


rain city

by deniigiq



Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Arachnophobia, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Crimes & Criminals, Dark, Deception, Dissociation, Don't say I didn't warn you, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, I am tagging everything so like read this shit first please, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Like way dark yo, M/M, Manipulation, Past Frank Castle/Matt, Stockholm Syndrome, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Team Red, like woah, lying
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:13:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22235395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “Not all of us can be like you, Matty,” he said. “But together, we could be more.”Much more.An empire, even. With the power of a blind man’s fury directed in a meaningful way.Yes.They could be so much more than their parts.(Kingpin Foggy AU.The kingpin bites off more than he can chew when he decides to take Daredevil for himself. He doesn't realize the guy has a family.)
Relationships: Matt Murdock & Peter Parker & Wade Wilson, Matt Murdock/Franklin "Foggy" Nelson, Matt Murdock/Wade Wilson
Comments: 120
Kudos: 452





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello. 
> 
> So. The folks on tumblr said Kingpin Foggy and sent me some lovely recs, to which my horrible brain said 'mm, but consider: what if he was so much worse than all that?'
> 
> And then this happened. 
> 
> Very dark. References to suicide, attempted murder, violence, and holding someone against their will below. Please do what you need to to take care of yourselves.

Back in college, Frank had had a roommate.

He’d been auburn-haired with smooth cheeks and a laugh like a bark and every time he laughed, he’d recoiled lightly with a hand on his sternum and a slack face like he was surprised that he was the one who had made such a sound.

He’d been blind.

He’d smiled and searched for Frank’s face in their shared room, passing it time and time again and settling on walls and beds and furniture instead.

He’d worked harder than anyone Frank knew. He left early for the library and came home late and his eyebrows had slipped slowly down the corners of his face when he didn’t know Frank was home, watching him in the kitchen from the other room.

His name was Matthew and he’d lived with Frank for three years. From day one at Columbia to graduation.

He’d smiled on graduation. Frank remembered him turning around and making a small, aborted gesture with his hand while everyone hugged and cheered around them.

He’d leaned into the moment and thrown his arms around Matthew.

A week later, he came in to pick up the remaining boxes from their shared apartment and the door had been left slightly ajar.

Frank hadn’t thought much of it since Matthew was moving, too. There was no moving truck outside, but Matthew had set three boxes—everything he owned—down in a neat pyramid under the living room window beside his computer and its refreshable display two nights ago when Frank had left for home.

Frank remembered all three of those boxes being there. They’d been so clean. So neatly taped. Not dented or bumped or wrinkled in the slightest.

The rest of the apartment had been quiet. Windows open just as they had been when Frank had left. Carpets freshly cleaned for the sake of the security deposit. Each room with its stripped single bed stood empty and clean.

It had smelled like wet dog from the carpet shampoo.

Matthew was nowhere to be found. Frank called his name because sometimes Matthew settled down in places and seemed to lose himself to his own thoughts. He needed a little help snapping out of them.

Frank was used to it.

Hadn’t thought anything of the lack of response for nearly ten minutes.

That was when he’d realized that the bathroom light was on.

That didn’t make sense. Matthew rarely turned it on. And Frank didn’t remember leaving it on when he’d left earlier in the week.

He’d stood up and stuck his head into Matthew’s empty bedroom.

And then he’d called 911.

Because his roommate had committed suicide over the bathroom sink.

He could still remember Matthew’s slumped body. The strips of pale skin that peered through the mess all over his unmoving form.

He could still remember the feeling of breathlessness that had fluttered through his throat as he’d laid his hand on Matthew’s back, following the emergency dispatcher’s instructions to check to see if he was warm.

He was.

They took him away.

Frank never saw him again.

And after a week or so, he’d been told that Matthew had not yet died. But he’d fallen into a coma and things didn’t look good.

He hadn’t felt anything but numb at first.

The only thing playing in his head, over and over, was the heat of Matthew’s lips against his for a fleeting second at the end of second year. They’d been hot and wet and Matthew’s dopey, soft face had once again looked surprised, as though he hadn’t realized that he was capable of partaking in such a thing.

Frank knew that had been a joke. But he’d been flattered to have incited such a reaction. And he’d pressed forward and sunk a hand into the soft skin at the small of Matthew’s back without thinking.

It had just seemed natural. So natural.

It never happened again. Because one year later, Matthew’s three boxes were the only things left of him.

Frank didn’t keep track of many things. But July 21st was the day he was supposed to leave Matthew. And Matthew had left first.

And that shit rankled.

Burned.

Scorched.

It should have been a sign early on, but Frank hadn’t noticed it. He’d been so preoccupied with being furious that Matthew and his dark eyes and freckles had had the audacity to think that he could lead Frank along all the way to the end and then leave.

Just like that.

Just as warm and twinkling as he’d come in.

Frank thought that the man he was now would have crushed that fluttering moth within mere hours of meeting it.

But it turned out that Matthew, with all his natural grace and intelligence, had known then what Frank knew now, and that was that the way out was far closer than anyone could ever anticipate.

Maybe Matthew had left Frank without so much as a goodbye settled in the swell of that lower lip of his.

But the rest since him?

They died screaming.

Frank would have it no other way.

He’d worked for a man who’d worn a white suit and then he’d worked for a man who’d worn a grey suit and then he’d worked for a woman who’d worked for a man, who no longer worked for that man, who’d worn beige and gold.

He’d knocked on her bathroom door and had opened it to find her as he’d once found Matthew and through the dark vicious waters she’d left all over her sink and herself, he’d plucked out her phone. And her ring.

He wore it now on his pinky.

They called him kingpin these days.

He hadn’t killed his predecessor. Or even the one before her.

They’d both done that on their own.

He’d just provided the appropriate motivation.

A daughter here. A wife and father there.

It was amazing how far people would bend when they had something whose life they valued more than their own.

Amazing.

It was lucky that Frank had nothing of that sort. Or else he’d be in big trouble, oh yes, he would. His right hand man would suffocate him in a second, he had no doubts about it. The one at the left wouldn’t though. No, he wouldn’t. Not anymore.

Yeris would learn soon.

Frank had plans for him. Just as soon as he was done having plans for the _Interference_.

The Interference was five foot ten inches tall.

His name was Ignorance. Audacity. Disgrace.

He had no sense of style or beauty or anything. He wanted, above all else, to die in a gutter, surrounded by glass, and bleeding out into a storm drain. And this, Frank was entirely prepared to give to him. Just as soon as he stayed still long enough to receive it.

It had been months, however. And the Interference still refused to receive his parting gifts. He’d taken out two warehouses of employees and yet he still refused to fall.

Frank thought that maybe he needed to drown after all.

He gave the order. And then returned to dinner with his new business partners.

But the Interference would not be drowned. Instead, he broke all of the glass in the restaurant’s window in order to have a go at Frank’s throat.

Frank decided that this, after weeks upon weeks of nothing but the same misbehavior—of glass broken, men beaten, blood spilled, and vehicles crumpled—was enough.

The Interference needed a lesson at the kingpin’s own hands.

He was strong. And he was graceful. And it was his turf out there in the streets, in the gravel and rain.

But it wasn’t enough and the ring on Foggy’s finger left a bruise in its shape on the side of Interference’s neck when he pulled his hands back.

His neck was pale. Frank’s hands were disgusting. Drenched in blood and saliva and deep bruises from where Interference’s square, knobbly fingers had tried to dig into them to release the pressure on his throat.

Frank almost stood up, but it was dark outside and pissing down rain and a moment of rage burned through his chest. Even the satisfaction of the stillness of the body across his thighs couldn’t sate it. So he let his puffing breath and the rain and his hands make the decision for him.

He lifted that infuriating helmet.

And Matthew’s soft dark lashes laid under it.

His smooth cheeks hid under bloody stubble and the swell in his bottom lip had been torn in two by Frank’s knuckles just moments earlier. The rain darkened his hair and soaked it into curls around his crushed cheekbone and puffy eye. And he laid there.

Just as warm as he had been all those years ago under Frank’s hand in that tiny bathroom.

Except not, somehow.

Something made him colder. Something made him loll his head back.

When he did, his paleness was replaced by nothing but red. Red was his throat from where Frank had sunk his palms into it. Red was the color bleeding out across his clavicle, where his thick black sweatshirt didn’t reach.

It didn’t suit him.

The blue of his lip didn’t either.

But Frank knew what would suit this man. This unkillable body that twisted and bled and _mocked_ him all these years after that moment which had cemented in Frank the knowledge that life was only cruel.

It wasn’t a color.

It was a shovel.

Matthew had grown into a beautiful man from a beautiful boy and Frank was ashamed of himself that he took more than one look at that swelling lip.

It was a shame, really. To think such thoughts of the dying.

The man he delivered Matthew’s body to said that it might be repaired with time and patience, but Frank had no need for such things.

He wanted to know how long it would take before Matthew’s body would wake up.

The man said maybe an hour. Which was inconvenient.

Well, what can you do?

Sometimes, you just have to start digging.

And Frank planned on digging this grave himself.

He got a few feet in when he paused to pant and lean against the shovel. He glanced over at the body beside him. The rain had done Matthew no favors, even if it had brought out the hue of that lovely skin of his.

No freckles to be seen on this version of Matthew. No, siree.

Angelic he was no more.

Just a gargoyle. A grotesque.

A stone chimera destined to be chipped, crushed, and buried.

But then Matthew’s fingers twitched and it was too late.

The hole wasn’t deep enough. The water coming down too hard.

And despite everything— _everything_ —the bullets, the glass, the cars, the fists, the screaming, the wailing, the _constant evasion_ —Frank had an idea. And it required a different mode of existence.

And it required Matthew’s body to stay warm.

So down went the shovel.

He had Matthew cleaned. He had the doctor repair him. He had that lip blotted and a stitch sunk into it. And he ensured that all this occurred under his supervision. With no anesthetic. So that he could hear Matthew’s sweet little subconscious whimpers as the devil was knitted back into him.

Thirty minutes from the end of this ordeal saw the unfortunate occurrence of Matthew waking up.

Still blind.

Never more afraid.

He screamed and he fought and he torn all the doctor’s hard work to pieces.

And he was so wild. So full of gesture and strength and resilience and _fight_.

Frank’s hand drifted over his heart and pressed in there close and deep as he took a shuddering breath he hadn’t meant to take.

Matthew would not be tamed.

He did not remember Frank. It was a sore spot, but Frank consoled himself by reminding himself that Matthew couldn’t see.

And no one else knew this.

He had everyone else fooled. He fought like a man who took his eyes for granted. He planned and schemed like someone who’d suffered no brain injury. He clung to life nothing at all like how he’d once so carelessly flung his away.

He was heart-stopping.

And he was Frank’s now. Struggling under his shushing and petting. Confused.

Coming to understand now that there was a familiar voice around him. One who he’d liked. One which had, on occasion, fed him before.

“You’re okay, Matty,” Frank said softly. “You’re okay. It’s okay. It’s me. It’s Foggy. Do you remember me?”

The struggling slowed like a river finally damned. A hand wrapped in torn, discolored gauze lifted, trembling, to brush the pads of fingers just barely against Frank’s jaw. His top lip. The curve of his cheek. He resisted the urge to recoil in disgust.

His friend had come back to him. And he was doing so well.

A little love and attention was all he needed. It was all he’d ever needed.

“Foggy?” Matthew’s crushed voice asked.

Like music to his ears.

“Yeah, Foggy,” Frank said. “You’re hurt, buddy. You need to lay still, okay? You’re tearin’ your stitches.”

“Foggy,” Matthew sighed, in real pain and distress. “You have to get out of here. The kingpin—he’ll—”

“Shhh,” Foggy said. “You’re okay, honey. You’re okay.”

He caught Matthew’s wrist and smoothed fingers over the brutalized knuckles on its back. Matthew’s hand went still. And his sloping eyebrows knitted together, closer and closer as his eyes started to release a few stragglers from their burden.

“No,” he whispered as the ring brushed against the unbroken skin on his knuckles.

“Yes,” Frank told him softly.

“No. No. _No_. Foggy, _no_.”

“You’re alright, darlin’. I’ve got you,” Frank told him. “Things will be easier from here. Don’t you worry. I could always use a new right hand man.”

“You can’t be—you can’t—”

Frank pressed a couple of before-untouchable knuckles to his lips and gave them a taste of the softness of his lips.

Matthew’s chest shook lightly with his devastated sobs.

“Not all of us can be like you, Matty,” he said. “But together, we could be more.”

Much more.

An empire, even. With the power of a blind man’s fury directed in a meaningful way.

Yes.

They could be so much more than their parts.


	2. floodlights

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter Parker was going to be a problem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I guess this a chapter fic now?? 
> 
> Like, okay. Sure. Let's do this, I guess. 
> 
> Just as a warning, there is some body-horror type of stuff in here. It's not like, super duper graphic or extreme, but it might be upsetting to folks with arachnophobia. So please do what you need to to keep yourselves safe.

Matthew had a secret, an oxymoronic one that was towering and tiny all at the same time.

It tumbled out into Frank’s hand a few weeks into Matthew’s conditioning.

It made fury blaze out across the branches of Frank’s lungs. Smoke billowed out and gathered in the hollows on the sides of his chest and it took a great deal of time before he could control himself enough to bring himself to stand in Matthew’s presence without feeling the need to lift a hand.

In the meantime, the secret carried on scurrying around. Scuttling on more legs than it deserved.

“What’s his name, Matty?” Frank asked the man before him.

Matthew said nothing.

He always said nothing.

Frank’s knuckles were drawn in towards each other like they were magnetized.

“I asked you a question, love,” he said, stepping in closer.

Still nothing.

Unfortunate.

Matthew was lovely all lax and laid out on his side, backlit by the light drifting in from the windows of the room.

He was too perfect to touch like that. Almost like a statue in a museum.

From this angle at least. But that was okay for now.

He was coming around, Matthew was. Sleeping when he was told, if still not eating. Kneeling when it was ordered, if not answering all of the questions that Frank needed answering.

The way he slumped into those commands he deigned to follow should have been pleasing to the eye and the heart, but instead, they made Frank’s shoulders go tense. For all that he wanted Matthew to come into his arms, there was something about his movements there in those moments, which sent little flickers of heat up behind Frank’s eyelids.

These movements were practiced.

Someone had taught Matthew his lessons before.

Someone had tarnished Frank’s new toy before he’d even been put on the shelf.

It shouldn’t have been surprising. Matthew had to have learned his infuriating skills from someone, and his deployment of these skills spoke of nothing short of supreme and prolonged discipline, both self-inflicted and guided.

But for some reason, it hadn’t occurred to Frank that his training might have been of a nonnegotiable type. After all, yes, Matthew had been beautifully broken and alluringly fragile back in their law school days, but surely that could be explained by all of the foster care and its many shadowy, lingering hands.

It was a stupid assumption to have made, Frank decided, and he’d avoid such idiocy in the future. In the meantime, there was a more pressing matter at hand, one which would require Matthew’s participation.

One which Frank was positive would move his new pet along in leaps and bounds.

After all, all these weeks and sessions had only confirmed what Frank already knew about Matthew.

He didn’t learn trust through the closed fist. An open palm was his poison. Specifically an upturned one. One held out, away from its body.

He had Matthew cleaned and made presentable in a suit Frank selected specifically for him. It was black. Not because Frank wanted it to be, but because that was Matthew’s signature.

Black suit. Gray tie.

Frank had a white stick brought for him. It had a round ball at its end and a thick red band around the bottom.

Frank didn’t see any of these until Matthew was stood before him, looking pale in the light and with the white shirt buttoned up to his neck. He cleaned up well. Even that troublesome lip.

He fidgeted with the loop at the top of the stick in his hands.

It was endearing. He didn’t seem aware that he was doing it, or that he did it more intensely in Frank’s presence.

Frank offered him an elbow.

They were going for a walk.

Matthew’s office was a dingy affair in the north of Hell’s Kitchen. It was aged and cluttered and reminded Frank more of a rat’s nest than a proper attorney’s office. For one, there was no wall of books anywhere in the place. There was a bookshelf out in a make-shift waiting area, but its shelves were crammed with paperback novels and large, clunky children’s books.

Matthew’s reference materials lived instead in his office and weren’t as impressive as most other lawyers’.

They had no titles on their spines and many had not been bound in color.

They were all in braille. Matthew had no need for books printed or bound any other way. He did not need to explain. Frank remembered his textbook collection.

The office itself was cramped. There was an awkward open space out in the front of it that served as both a reception and waiting room and Matt’s enclosed office was crushed in at the far lefthand side of the place. There was a secondhand table on the other side of the reception desk. It was stacked with tea and instant coffee, alongside a myriad of different colored paper cups and stir-sticks and sugars and creams. A bathroom door stood directly across from Matthew’s office.

In terms of space, it needed much work.

But it would do.

Frank informed Matthew that he would be having a new sign made for the place, and in the meantime, the walls needed a fresh coat of paint. The windows needed opening and the whole place dusting—not to mention the actual coffee pot that wanted purchasing.

“I don’t understand,” Matthew said.

He was just playing stupid now.

What he really wanted was a confirmation of the conclusion to which all of the facts were leading him.

“Why, Matty. We’re partners now, are we not? And asking me to work in a dump like this might actually be cruel and unusual punishment,” Frank explained to him.

Matthew, bless his darling heart, didn’t even know how much of an asset he was.

He’d lived for so long, driving Frank to the brink of sanity from dusk until dawn and making a nuisance of himself to the police and public authority and order, that he’d forgotten that his day job was nothing short of squeaky clean.

Bleached, even.

Matthew Murdock’s law practice had not a dent in its record. Sure, he’d annoyed a handful of people in a variety of public offices and departments by invoking tenant rights and custodial claims and insisting that medical compensation be paid and evictions be overturned, but beyond that, in this neighborhood, his name rang like a bell.

He was well loved. Highly thought of. Just generally favored, by the old and the young alike.

And while Frank did indeed have an army of bodies moving below and around him at his behest, what he didn’t have was an alibi.

The Kingpin rarely needed one.

If their organization was any kind of stable, then any trouble would be absorbed in the ranks before it even reached their ears, and Frank’s organization was more than stable. It was well-oiled and thriving. But that wasn’t enough in this political climate. It was never enough to rely on the stability of a bunch of moving and desperate bodies.

What Frank needed was distance. Assurance. An identity which even the sharpest scrutiny could not reach.

He could think of no better place to build those things than right here in Hell’s Kitchen, arm in arm with dear blind Matthew Murdock, his old law school buddy.

Matthew protested vehemently. He would rather his office go to ruin than to let his clients brush hands with the city’s Kingpin, he claimed.

But he was brought around. He didn’t have any choice. All of his choices were Frank’s to make now.

Frank soothed his upset by promising him that this arrangement was not so bad as he thought. Frank had a cover to establish and Matthew had a loyal clientele. Frank would do nothing to endanger himself or his organization, and if that meant playing the kind-hearted fool, then fine, so be it.

Frank would play Foggy Nelson. He’d help these people get their tedious little traffic tickets overturned and their screeching maggots of children back into their arms. And Matthew would still have a say in his clients and no person associated with any other syndicates or even their syndicate would be allowed to compromise their arrangement. Frank would see to that.

He’d see to the protection of their clients.

So what do you say, Matthew?

How much does intention matter in the spreading of kindness and generosity?

What other options do you have left in your corner?

Matthew asked for a moment of privacy to think about it. And because he was feeling benevolent and like they were on the cusp of a breakthrough, Frank gave it to him. He let him go back into his tiny office and listened to the muffled scream of frustration and the sound of objects crashing off a desk.

He relished it.

Matthew agreed.

Nelson & Murdock, attorneys at law, was born.

In the early days, Frank—or rather, Foggy, as he told people to call him—kept Matthew close by. He kept the leash as short as it could be. But of course word spread like norovirus in the close quarters of Hell’s Kitchen and quickly a flood of old clients and new clients came rushing in through the doors.

Along with them came bodies which Fra— _Foggy_ was familiar with.

Luke Cage.

James Buchanan Barnes.

Elektra Natchios.

These and their ilk all came in to touch Matthew with their grimy hands and sweaty arms. They smeared their smells and oils all over him and told him over and over that they’d been so worried about him. That they’d tried to get ahold of him over the last month.

They all wanted to know if Peter was okay and who this new partner of his was—he’d never mentioned wanting a partner in the firm before.

It was hard to keep a newly leashed beast held securely across a crowded room. Especially a blind one who could pick up no warning eye.

But Matthew knew where he stood.

He smiled that fragile smile of his and introduced his aggravating friends to Foggy.

“We roomed together at Columbia for three years,” he said. “Foggy was a real life saver. The situation at his other firm was oppressive, so he decided to get a fresh start and join me in managing the workload out here.”

Matthew had few friends. These other irritants knew how resistant he was to trusting others. And so they gazed upon Foggy like he was a novelty. They shook his hand and said that if he ever needed anything, to give them a call. A friend of Murdock’s was a friend of theirs.

They truly had no idea.

When the office doors closed up for the day at the end of the first week, Foggy leaned against the reception desk and counted down the moments until Matthew could no longer put off the inevitable.

His office door opened and he stepped out.

Foggy stood up and held out his elbow.

“I think we’re in business,” he said as Matthew’s jerky, twitching hand hooked around his own arm.

Matthew said nothing.

“Tell me about Peter,” Foggy said as he opened the doors.

That towering secret was one no longer. And oh, was it good.

Fat.

And soft.

Peter Parker was a tiny flea of a child. He had messy, mousy hair and a sharp chin and long eyelashes.

Foggy made Matthew gather him up out of the arms of one Jessica Jones after Matthew’s apartment had been inspected and appraised.

The boy was a ball of sound, tears, and snot. He clung to Matthew’s chest and sunk fingers into the fabric of his jacket, wrinkling and ruining it every which way, and Matthew tolerated this with nothing more than a soft, hushing voice and a hand smoothing over the child’s hair over and over again.

The boy was the Spider.

Matthew grasped at him and held him protectively to his chest. He tried to hide the boy from Foggy’s view.

He could hear Foggy’s heart hammering away in fury in his chest.

The boy ought to die.

The boy ought to have died time and time again.

An infuriating child, he was. An obnoxious blight on the face of the earth. A irreverent, incorrigible little beast of thing.

He never should have been made.

He should have been suffocated just minutes old, under the gloved hand of a nurse.

And yet, Matthew stood here, just taking the thing’s whines and whimpers and moaning into his chest. He tried to protect it.

His lip trembled ever so slightly with every throb of Foggy’s heart.

Jessica Jones had a child of her own, a tubby little grub of a thing cooing on her hip. She told Matthew that she could keep the boy for longer if he needed time to get things straightened out. She said that the boy had missed him desperately and had cried many times for him in his absence.

Foggy couldn’t believe that the Spider reveled in such disgusting displays of weakness. This _creature_ was one that had ripped the seams out of numerous of the organization’s operations over the last two years. It was nothing short of insulting that the bane of the ranks’ existence was a child whose voice had not yet begun to fall.

After a moment of watching the revolting display of desperation before him, Foggy took a deep breath and settled his breathing.

This was a good thing, he reminded himself.

It was…enlightening.

It told him that his rank and file weren’t as effective as they claimed to be. It exposed them as incompetent liars, whose replacement would only benefit the organization as a whole.

And there an opportunity here.

The Spider, as it were, legally belonged to Matthew. He trusted Matthew. Matthew knew more about him than anyone else, it would seem.

An opportunity indeed.

Foggy had already acquired one vigilante. He could only imagine what he could do with two.

Matthew introduced Foggy to the Spider as he had with the others before him, except as he did this, the boy pressed into his side and refused to let go. He wasn’t interested in Foggy. He only wanted reassurance from Matthew that he wouldn’t leave him alone like the others before him had.

Matthew cupped his wrist and chided him lightly to be polite and say hello, which the child did, but not willingly. His forehead wrinkled deeply as he looked at Foggy and he buried himself into Matthew’s chest before mumbling a greeting Foggy’s way.

Then he hid his face in the folds of Matthew’s shirt.

He was twelve years old, Foggy learned. And very sensitive, Matthew said, with a pleading expression on his face.

Very quiet and obedient and no trouble at all, he claimed.

Foggy doubted that.

The Spider existed to be crushed, as far as he was concerned.

Matthew clutched the boy closer to him and covered the side of his face with a hand.

Foggy made a show of making the decision to allow the child to remain in the land of the living. He could see already that he would be an effective bargaining chip with Matthew, and god only knew what the boy would be capable of in a few years, given that he was already single-handedly shaking Foggy’s faith in his bottom ranks.

The boy didn’t understand what was happening. He looked up at Matthew’s jaw and asked if they could go home together now.

Matthew swallowed and told him that yes, they could.

But he should know just one thing.

Foggy had a number of residences to which he would retire at will. He did not intend to live with Matthew and Peter, but he didn’t trust Matthew to remain loyal on his own yet. So he spun a story about Matthew having agreed to let him stay at his apartment with the two of them for a short period of time.

Just until the next month started and Foggy’s new lease kicked in.

The Spider accepted this explanation. Matthew kept a hand on his head and his own face angled towards Foggy as often as possible. Trying to read Foggy’s thoughts. Trying to stay in step.

It made Foggy smile.

Matthew had never been more submissive. Not even on his knees.

The satisfaction at this didn’t last long, however, because not only was it exhausting to keep up the Nice Guy act, but the Spiderchild was honestly very, _very_ strange.

Foggy was aware that certain people among the population were enhanced and/or mutated by forces outside of their control. He was aware now that Matthew was one of such people.

He’d tested Matthew’s senses in his quest to locate those things which would bring him down from his high horse, should he ever stumble across the impulse to climb back up there.

They were fascinating but appeared to be largely painful more than helpful to him. He was easily and frequently overwhelmed by sensory input and something as simple as an unappealing cologne was enough to put him ill at ease for hours upon hours of the day.

The Spiderchild, however, was something else entirely.

Foggy wouldn’t go as far as to say he was afraid of the boy, but he would admit to being unsettled by him.

 _Incredibly_ unsettled by him.

The boy—Peter, Foggy supposed he ought to call him—looked normal. As normal as any particularly puny twelve-year-old might, anyways.

But there was just something so wrong about him at the same time.

To start with, he clicked.

Constantly.

Not with his tongue. He didn’t pop his fingers. None of his joints were old enough to creak.

No. He just clicked. In his throat. He did it faster and slower throughout the day and he often didn’t even seem to know he was doing it. He clicked faster in Foggy’s presence. He often jerked, jolted, and whipped around to stare at Foggy for no reason at all. He would just stare. With eyes that seemed darker and shinier with each passing second.

And that clicking would get faster and louder and faster and louder until the boy would wrinkle his nose and curl his lips Foggy’s way before scurrying off out of sight more quickly and silently than any human should have been able to move.

He often ran to hide behind Matthew. He latched onto the man’s side wherever he was, in the kitchen, in bed, on the blood-crusted couch, and stayed there, glaring at Foggy with those eerie, almost black eyes.

Just.

Clicking.

Slower when he was attached to Matthew, but faster again if anyone made any sudden movement.

The only thing that would quiet the clicking was Matthew’s attention. Matthew seemed not to notice the clicking most of the time, which was baffling. When he did notice it, it was usually when the rhythm sped up and he would pause in what he was doing and touch the boy’s hair or arm.

Then the kid would look up at him and the clicking would vanish.

And Matthew would carry on like nothing had happened.

Foggy didn’t know what to make of this.

Peter was clearly enhanced and the clicking seemed to be some type of warning sound. But even that wasn’t the strangest of his behaviors.

No.

That was the closet thing.

The closet thing was essentially that Peter had no bedroom in Matthew’s apartment, nor wanted or needed one.

He slept in cupboards.

He hid in them. Retreated to them. He would very occasionally allow himself to be cuddled on Matthew’s bed while watching some show on Netflix or listening to a podcast with him, but beyond that, the boy was allergic to mattresses.

Matthew always asked him where he wanted to sleep at night as evidently, he was as uncomfortable with the boy not having his own bed as Foggy was, but the answer was always ‘the closet.’ The one in the living room. It was more of a wardrobe than a closet, but Peter called it ‘the closet’ and it was his preferred resting place when he was tired, although he also slept in the storage cupboard at the far end of Matthew’s hallway. And if he had a nightmare or a distressing thought or dream—which was not uncommon, Foggy came to learn—he would seek out Matthew’s bedroom closet and hide himself in there, among the jackets and shoes and athletic gear.

Matthew worked himself up over Foggy’s discomfort with these strange behaviors.

When Peter vanished himself to whatever dark corner he so desired, Matthew chewed his lips and murmured apologies towards Foggy. Always saying that the boy couldn’t help it. He was only young. He’d been through a lot and this was how his mutation and trauma manifested.

Foggy doubted that. Not the whole thing, but rather the last point.

This wasn’t trauma.

This was a mutation, pure and simple.

Peter was a human spider. A feral, venomous thing that laid in wait in dark places, scuttling to and fro to catch and trap its prey.

His skittishness and unwillingness to trust was animal behavior.

He was barely human.

And the more Foggy observed him, the more wary he became.

Matthew’s mutation, or rather, enhancement, was stable and predictable. He had coping mechanisms. He could channel his abilities and energies into specific directions when required.

The boy could do none of those things. There was no telling how much further his mutation would advance. He was difficult to track and even harder to predict and Foggy got a horrible, crawling feeling every time he turned his back on him.

It felt like Peter was somehow always watching him. Always. Even when he was hiding or swinging his feet at the table while doing homework.

Foggy didn’t even know what to make of him anymore. Before, he’d thought the child might be an asset, but now, all he could think was that he needed to be driven away from Matthew before he bit him or somehow lost control and suffocated him in his webs.

It was upsetting.

Foggy didn’t like to admit it, but at the end of the day, Peter was…beyond him.

He either needed to be harnessed, and fast, or he needed to be killed. There were no other options, and Foggy wasn’t sure which one would be the better one at the moment.

His waffling meant that he had nothing to do but watch as Matthew tried to look after this boy as best as he could. And when the time came for Foggy to leave, he could not say that he would miss being in that apartment.

It was supposed to have been a power trip, a way of teaching Matthew that from now on, he was under watch and he needed to self-regulate his behavior, but it had just become a nightmare.

Peter Parker was going to be a problem.

But Foggy needed time to figure out exactly what to do about him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so in this verse, Peter is 12 yo and has lost his whole family. He was bitten by a spider around 9, Ben died around 10, and a year later, May was killed as a result of the Kingpin's activities (Peter blames the Kingpin for her death and he and Matt have this in common). Matt found him way earlier in this AU because he was so little. He brought him home to May and tried to dissuade him from vigilantism. May appreciated his care and made him promise to keep Peter safe if anything ever happened to her.


	3. and all will know the wonder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Punisher was ugly.  
> He had no right to velvet.  
> He had no right to Matthew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References to Past Matt/Frank and WOAH emotional manipulation **read the tags guys**

Matthew had a friend.

Foggy felt a little silly—a little foolish really—for not having noticed him sooner.

When he did, though, he felt a strong compulsion to give Matthew a bath. More than a bath. A dousing; a scrubbing, a thorough sanitization. The indents of the Punisher’s hands on Matthew’s skin just wouldn’t vanish from Foggy’s eyes no matter how red and raw that skin became.

Matthew was good during his scrubbing, though. He stayed still. He let his cheek lay flat against the tile in the shower. He didn’t even shiver under Foggy’s hand anymore this days.

Foggy believed that this was called ‘dissociating,’ which, if he remembered correctly, Matthew had done plenty of back in their tiny two bedroom at Columbia.

It was nice to see him sinking back into the human velvet he’d been back then. Comforting.

He thought Matthew was more comfortable, too, especially post-bath.

Foggy pulled him up with rivulets of water still streaming over his shoulders and took the towel off the toilet seat to drape over them.

“Nice and clean,” he told Matthew.

Matthew’s lashes dipped and lifted slow as syrup.

“Get dressed,” Foggy told him. “Peter’s on his way home from school now.”

The Punisher was a problem. He’d been a problem before and he continued to be a problem and it was funny how when Foggy had plucked Matthew’s string in the tangled web that was the underground city, all of the ones around him began to sing.

They made a chord. And the chord brought problems vibrating down along the strings, right into Foggy’s lap. First the Spider, now Frank Castle.

Who knew what Matthew’s humming would bring along next?

Foggy didn’t. Although, he had to say, he wasn’t terribly interested in finding out. Frank Castle was plenty to occupy his mind with at present.

The scum.

The sewer monster.

If Foggy hadn’t come back to the office when he had, who knew what kind of stains that sentient algae would have left on Matthew. All ‘Red’ this and ‘Red’ that. As if Frank Castle didn’t know Matthew’s name.

Foggy could kill him.

No, he really could. He could sink his fingers into Frank Castle’s throat and squeeze and squeeze and _squeeze_. Until the skin under his hands was red and purpling.

A deep breath reminded him that he didn’t want to do that. No, see, that was the language that the Punisher spoke in. He’d laugh under Foggy’s hands. That was the kind of sick hound he was. He’d laugh and he’d work that jaw of his, trying to bite and when he couldn’t, he’d kick and when that got him nowhere, he’d just laugh again.

The Punisher was ugly.

He had no right to velvet.

He had no right to Matthew.

Foggy went to his own apartment. He needed a shower.

Foggy was surprised to find out in the days that came that the Spider didn’t like Frank Castle either. When Foggy came over that Thursday evening to check on his latest project, the Spider was so distraught by the man’s presence in Matthew’s bedroom that he surged out of the shadows and grabbed Foggy’s hand.

The willpower it took not to slap him or shake him off was immense, but the satisfaction that came with the boy whispering, “Foggy?” in a tone that sounded more like a scared child than a beast was just as heavy.

“What’s wrong, little dude?” Foggy asked him. “Is the big guy home? He left his bag at the office.”

The Spider’s lips thinned and he shook his head back and forth silently.

“There’s a man here,” he whispered.

Yes, Foggy could hear him.

“A friend of Matt’s?” Foggy asked him.

He heard Matthew order Frank Castle to leave through the wall to his bedroom. His voice didn’t carry on the last syllable, but Foggy knew all his tones now.

Please, Matthew had said. Leave. _Please_.

The Punisher would not. His masculinity would not be spurned by such a delicate-looking soul.

“He yells,” the Spider said softly.

His fingers tightened around Foggy’s hand. Foggy furrowed his brow down at him.

“Well, that’s not good,” he said, pulling his hand back carefully.

The Spider let him have it. He wasn’t clicking. He was just staring. Eyes dark and shiny as coal.

This, Foggy realized after a breath, was a good thing.

A very good thing.

He sent the Spider to his closet to hide in with a promise that he’d look after Matthew and the boy readily went. Foggy made sure that the door of the thing was closed before moving towards the bedroom. He took off his ring and put it in his pocket.

The Punisher only needed to know what he needed to know, and what he needed to know was nothing.

It was only Foggy’s ego that wanted him to know who Matthew truly belonged to and egos were nothing if not trouble.

So the ring said, anyways.

He knocked on the door and the rumbling inside went silent. The sound of Matthew choking on a sob was familiar.

“Mom and Dad are busy, kid,” Frank Castle rasped.

Piece of shit.

“At least put on some music then,” Foggy replied to absolute silence.

“Who the fuck is that?” Castle growled urgently behind the door.

Matthew said nothing. He was probably just shaking his head.

“No, you fucking look at me,” Castle said. “Who the _fuck_ is that?”

“He can’t look, man,” Foggy interrupted. “Is there a reason you’re up here, takin’ lunch money from a blind guy and his kid?”

The resulting pause was just as bitter as the first.

“Name,” he heard Castle demand of Matthew.

“Nelson,” Foggy said for him. “Franklin Nelson, attorney at law? Frank Nelson, calling the cops if you don’t clear out?”

He waited.

The door opened.

Frank Castle’s dark eye stared down at him like the face of a grandfather clock. His lip curled.

“Matt’s busy, friend-o,” he said. “Come back another time.”

“Frank,” Matthew said urgently. “I’m not—don’t. Don’t. Come back here, I’ll tell you whatever you want. Whatever you want to hear, just—”

“I DON’T WANT TO HEAR WHAT I WANT TO HEAR,” Castle roared, abandoning Foggy at the door to go tower over Matthew, nearly chest to chest with him.

Matthew winced hard away. His hands flinched up to cover his ears. Castle didn’t care; he got a fistful of Matthew’s shirt between them.

“You’re gonna tell me, right now, Murdock, if you have even an _inkling_ about what you’re fucking doing?” Castle continued viciously, with his lips nearly touching Matt’s cheek.

“I don’t,” Matthew pleaded.

“You’re _lying_ ,” Castle barked.

“I’m not,” Matthew repeated.

“You’re a sell out,” Castle snarled.

“ _Leave already_ ,” Matthew snapped with sudden ferocity. “You’re scaring me, you’re scaring my kid--you’re just _screaming_ , Frank. I don’t—I don’t feel safe right now.”

To Foggy’s surprise, those last words left the room silent and aching. Frank Castle pulled back and let go of Matthew’s shirt like it burned him.

“What?” he asked. “What? No. Red, I didn’t mean—”

“I don’t feel safe,” Matthew said, turning away from Castle and Foggy at the door to press the cuff of his sleeve to his face.

“Red,” Castle said, softer now. “Sweetheart, no. I didn’t mean it like that. I was just tryin’ to—”

“GET OUT,” Matthew roared as the desperate devil that he was just under the surface. It didn’t last though. His lower lip shook. He swallowed and lost control. He jerked away again and tried to calm himself enough to speak, but he could only manage ragged breathing and strangled sounds of frustration.

“Matt,” Castle said, suddenly all bent eyebrows and dark puppy-dog eyes. “Matt, no. No, buddy, talk to me—”

“He doesn’t want to,” Foggy interrupted firmly. “He said he wants you to leave. So leave.”

Castle looked back at him startled, as if he’d forgotten that Foggy was even there to begin with. Matthew’s folded cane slipped off his wrist and clattered to ground; he didn’t chase it. Instead, he pressed both hands to his face and tried to take deep breaths.

“Matt?” Castle asked, nearly hoarse with how quiet he was trying to be. “Don’t cry. Please, don’t cry. I’d never hurt you, you know I’d never hurt you—or the kid—or this guy, whoever he is. It’s—I’m just—I’m _confused_ , pal. I don’t know what’s goin’ on in that head of yours. You were gone for _weeks_ , and then you just turn up again and move on and it’s like nothin’ happened. You start working these weird jobs and you don’t answer anyone’s texts and—and you didn’t even call. Why didn’t you call?”

And why should he? Foggy yearned to ask. With your hulking mass screaming into his face?

Matthew responded to tenderness. He’s velvet, Frank Castle. Can you not see that?

Matthew’s shoulders started shaking. Normally, Foggy let him have his privacy to tremble and huff and scream, but things were getting a little too close for comfort.

Castle had no place in the world that Foggy was making.

Matthew knew that. And he knew that Foggy was watching and waiting. Watching and waiting. Peter was outside the room, too. Watching and waiting. His slender neck was dependent on Matthew’s choice in this moment.

But Matthew was too overwhelmed to make it.

Bless him.

That was okay.

That was what Foggy was there for.

He stepped past Frank Castle and caught Matthew’s elbows in his own palms. His trembling increased three-fold, but Foggy shushed him and pulled him back towards the edge of his mattress. He eased him down to sitting and settled in with him with an arm laid over his shoulders.

‘It’s okay,’ he let the gesture say. ‘I’ll help you make this decision. You did what you had to; you did what I asked you to. Let me carry the rest for you.’

Matthew’s sobs finally broke when Foggy pressed the back of his head against his collarbone. He looked up dangerously to see Frank Castle standing before him, wide-eyed with shock.

“Leave,” Foggy snarled at him. “You’ve done enough here.”

“Matt?” Castle asked.

“ _Leave_ ,” Foggy ordered. “Before I call the fucking police.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was how you got rid of Frank Castle.

Foggy decided that Matthew needed positive affirmation in the wake of his ordeal. He told him to lay down. He told him that he’d done so well. He promised that he’d look after Peter. Matthew just needed to rest and process.

He smoothed Matthew’s hair back from his head and took off his shoes. He pulled the duvet over him and let him bury himself into it and the pillows. Then he went out to find the Spider.

Peter latched himself around Foggy’s chest with a suffocating grip. He squeezed his eyes closed and hid his face in Foggy’s ribs and he muttered the tiniest ‘thank you’ that Foggy had ever heard.

It was…pleasing.

The kid needed a deep-clean and a thorough inspection for extra eyes and hair, but the gesture was a huge step forward for both of them.

The Spider was coming around. And all it took was a bit of hand-holding and good timing.

“You’re okay, buddy. Everyone’s okay,” Foggy murmured down at the Spider’s sniffing. “Here, let’s make some dinner, huh? For you and for Matt. Everything’s easier with some food and a good night’s sleep.”

The Spider nodded against his ribs and finally pulled back to rub his sleeve against his eyes. They weren’t so black when they looked up at Foggy this time. They were almost…amber.

There was no clicking.

So apparently Frank Castle wasn’t so useless after all.

Huh.

Noted.


	4. all for spite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wade added another tally with a shaking fist to the list that he kept against the Kingpin. And he looked at it. And his hand shook.   
> And he forced himself to smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> references to suicidal thoughts and behavior below. Please PLEASE do what you need to to keep yourselves safe. 
> 
> On that note: hello, Wade. We've been waiting for you to get here and steer this fucking ship

He had to clean the guns. Then he had to clean the swords. Then he had to clean his nails and his teeth and he had to bleach the suit in the bath before running in through the washer by itself.

And while that happened, he had to clean the tub and then he had to scrub the boots and slosh water all over them.

All to get off all the blood.

And only then, only when the suit was clean, the hands were clean, the skin was clean, new sheets were out of the dryer and on the couch, folded underneath the heavy, pilling fleece with a tiger on it that he’d bought on the side of the road in Nevada—only then could Wade sit down on the couch and text Peter that he was home.

Peter’s excitement rattled through his phone barely two minutes later and while the corners of Wade’s mouth were tired and heavy, they still lifted.

This kid.

This kid, man.

He met Peter after he’d dragged him out hissing, snarling, and just about foaming from the crawl space between a rotting foundation and a brick wall.

Peter’s cheek scraped against the wall on the way out and when Wade had finally gotten him immobile enough to get a good look at him, he’d been covered in a good layer of filth and dust and blood.

He fought so hard he twisted Wade’s arm out of socket and he’d thought that that was his chance to make a run for it, but hadn’t banked on Wade being, well. Wade.

He’d slammed into another wall at the end of an alley with Wade on his tail hours later and had made this little moaning sob that had told Wade he was almost done.

He kept chasing though.

The Spider climbed walls. The Spider moved through shadows.

The Spidery had to be cornered into place with walls on each side, including up and down.

So Wade drove him north and north and north until he was tripping and stumbling over rotting planks at the docks. Wade kept driving him even then.

C’mon, little Spider. Let’s see what you got. Come on, little Spider. How far can you go?

Wade got him into the back of a shipping container and advanced until he was standing right over the kid.

Peter had been too tired at that point and too scared and that determination of his had finally, finally cracked. On his back. Under Wade’s shadow. Crying like the baby that he actually was.

Wade brought him home.

Wade gave him a bath. Ran fingers through his thick hair to pull out the grit and the glass.

He was just a baby. Ten years old, then, showing Wade as much with all the fingers he had.

Incredible.

He was incredible.

Wade brought him home and the boy’s aunt clasped him in her arms and sobbed into his hair and said only ‘thank you’ for minutes on end.

She was gone now.

Her cold, pale fingers was all Wade could remember her by these days.

She’d trusted him. She’d trusted Red. There was no one else for Peter after her. And Red had crossed his heart and signed a paper saying that he would take Peter in the event that anything happened to her. He’d done this with Wade at his back. Wade’s own name didn’t touch the paper with Peter’s on it. But May had known. Wade had wrapped his fingers around Red’s over his heart.

They would take the boy.

They would protect the boy.

She’d cried ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’ all over again.

And then she’d died. Only weeks later. On her own kitchen floor, to be found by her nephew when he came home from school.

Peter had curled up on the fire-escape, crying silently in his street clothes. Too afraid to leave it until the police called Red and Red called Wade and Wade picked him up and carried him out of the place he’d once called home.

Peter was his and Red’s now. Their what? No one knew. Their something. Their Peter.

He was newly twelve and Red had gone missing just months after his birthday.

Wade had been in the great north, settling a score with some bodies that had no right to be walking. He’d made good money. He always did.

Enough to come home for a while and make a bed out of the couch and to look after a twelve-year-old so that Jessica Jones and her partners could set out into the night and find Red’s cold body.

Wade had no illusions as to what they would find.

Red had texted him before he’d gone in. He’d said that he loved them both—Wade and Peter. But he had to do this. He told Wade that he was going to come back. He swore he’d come back.

So when he didn’t, Wade knew what had happened to him and he sat up late that night, too empty to even feel the burn of whiskey in the open sores in his mouth.

Red didn’t deserve to go so soon into that gentle night.

Wade added another tally with a shaking fist to the list that he kept against the Kingpin. And he looked at it. And his hand shook.

And he forced himself to smile.

He didn’t expect the next text he got from Peter to be one that said ‘Matt’s home!!’

Jessica Jones texted him next and said that Red had returned and taken Peter with him back to his loft. Her message didn’t end there.

“He’s haunted,” she said.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

“There’s a man with him.”

And it wasn’t Frank Castle.

Red was kind of guy who felt the world around him as it was and begged it to be softer. He was vicious and he was strong and he was fiery and brave. But once a broken and beaten kid, man—old habits die hard.

Wade knew the guy who Jones said she’d seen.

Man, did he know him.

 _God_ , did he know him.

And he had to say, in that part of him that hadn’t stopped laughing since that feelingless shot of whiskey, that that shit was well fucking played.

Touché, Kingpin.

Tou-fucking-ché.

Now get out of my house. And get the fuck off of my devil. And get ready to lay on the burning coals of hell itself.

Because Wade thought the fuck not.

It was enough that the Kingpin had taken Red into his fold, but to take Peter?

Ha. No.

He didn’t get to be that powerful in Wade’s world.

So as Wade made the bed on the couch, he picked up a few bits and bobs here and there. A rattling bottle of Tylenol. A glass of water. He put the tiger blanket on the arm of the couch next to a blue navy one. It was less used than the tiger. And it wouldn’t be staying there with it. It just rested there while Wade set the first-aid kit on the counter and made sure he had a bottle of coke in the fridge along with a new handle of whiskey in the cabinet. 

Once he put Peter to bed, they’d need pity liquor.

And boy, they’d be drinking tonight.

Red cried in his arms. Bless him. Peter didn’t understand, but he accepted more and more these days that the adults around him cried almost more often than he did and he let Wade hug him and lay him down to sleep in the living room on the newly-made pull-out bed.

Peter struggled to sleep horizontally. It hurt his spine and blankets made him claustrophobic, but they’d worked on it over the last year or so and he felt safe enough in Wade’s home to let his locked bones relax. He couldn’t do a duvet, but he could manage the tiger blanket. He didn’t want Wade to leave him for a while and dug too-small, too-thin fingers into his shirt.

His eyes seemed glossy and confused.

“You’re okay, hon,” Wade told him. “Matt’s okay, too. I’m gonna make sure.”

The fingers flexed.

Peter didn’t understand.

He thought that the man who stayed over at Red’s home every so often was Red’s friend.

He didn’t understand.

He thought that that man was Red’s partner at his office.

He tugged at Wade’s shirt and his eyes lightened slowly as his pupils receded to a more human size.

“Everything’s okay,” Wade hushed him. “Let me take care of Matt, okay? Can you go to sleep for me?”

It was a shitty fucking world out there that had taught Peter that unconsciousness was easier than asking questions. He blinked a few times and let go of Wade’s shirt and settled his cheek against the blanket-covered pillow under his head.

“Tell me later?” he asked.

“I’ll think about it,” Wade told him.

He’d think about it.

Red was a mess. Barely holding himself together. Threatening to shake himself apart at the seams.

Wade let him moan. Let him shake. Let him talk as much as he could before the words dried up or got lost in the ache of his throat.

What was there to say?

It was a miracle, somehow, that he was there in Wade’s bed, leaking tears against his chest, shuddering out stories about consciousness during surgery. Constant surveillance. Isolation from friends and family.

Red was terrified for Peter. He shook so badly through tears as he told Wade this that Wade could barely keep his anger under the surface.

“I should have died,” Red whispered. “I should die, Wade. I want to die, Wade.”

Yeah.

Yeah, no can do, bub. That wasn’t going to happen. Not on Wade’s watch.

“Why couldn’t he have killed me?”

“I don’t like when you talk like that,” Wade interrupted.

Red recoiled and murmured apologies into the skin on his chest. They blended in there with the tears and lost their meaning in Red’s mumbling.

Wade could only blink slowly.

“Hey,” he said.

Red went still.

“I’ve got you,” Wade told him, gathering him into the hollow of his throat and pulling his arms as tight as they could go before being crushing. “And I won’t let him hurt you anymore.”

“I think he loves me,” Red told him in the morning, levered up on an elbow and staring at Wade’s shoulder. He’d never looked so pale.

“That’s okay, he can die loving,” Wade said.

Red let his eyes fall closer to Wade’s hip.

Wade watched them go and lifted a hand to smooth a thumb across his cheek.

“You’ll get over him,” he said. “Think about Peter.”

“He saved me.”

“He plays these games, Matt.”

“No. You don’t understand.”

Wade sighed.

“No, Wade,” Red said, wrapping fingers around Wade’s on his face. “Listen. He’s not lying—not like you think. We went to Columbia together. He didn’t make that up. He was my roommate. For three years. We lived together.”

“He can die loving,” Wade repeated.

“He held me one night and I kissed him,” Red whispered. “And he let me.”

Red was drawn towards violence. Violent people. Violent love. Violent sex. Wade knew the rest of this story already.

“And he fucked me,” Red said. “And it was so nice. And so kind. And I got—I got overwhelmed and I couldn’t—I couldn’t bear th—the thought of him not being there. But obviously he wouldn’t stay—he never—he never showed any—I thought he was drunk or maybe high and maybe he couldn’t remember. But he never—he never said anything and that was it? And we graduated and he still never—I was so _stupid_ , Wade.”

Yeah, he really was.

Blowing shit like that out of proportion. Infatuation did that to you.

“He left after graduation,” Red said. “I knew he’d come back, but I? I just thought, well if he’s the one who finds me—if he’s the one who remembers me last—maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing, right?”

Oh, honey.

No.

Say it ain’t so.

“He found me,” Red said. “And he called the ambulance. He saved my life. And then he was gone. I don’t know what happened—I don’t know what went wrong—he’s not like this, Wade. He was never—I lived with him for _three years_.”

“People change,” Wade said.

“What if I’d have said something?” Red asked over him. “What if I’d have—is it stupid to think that maybe—maybe he was waiting for me? Maybe this is my fault? If I’d have said something first—if I hadn’t been so scared to bring everything back up—”

“Do you know how unbelievably selfish it is to think that your lovin’ coulda changed this man for the better?” Wade asked.

Red fell silent.

“I do,” he said to the sheets. “But Wade.”

No, no, no.

No ‘but Wade’s. None of this. Don’t say it. Don’t fucking say it. They already lived in a shit enough world. There was a motherless, fatherless, everyone-less child out on the sofa—he was proof of it if nothing else was.

“I loved him.”

God. So what?

Wade loved Vanessa.

Wade loved Nate.

Wade loved Dom.

Wade loved fuckin’ _Red_.

And none of that had ever mattered to anyone, had it?

“You love Frank,” Wade said.

“And you,” Red said. “Frank _and_ you. But I _loved_ him. I wanted him to save me from myself and he did.”

Red’s voice went high and shook as his throat closed.

“And he saved me from myself again,” he warbled though a sniff. “But this isn’t him anymore.”

This blind man would never see the facts laid out in front of him. He refused to run his hands over them and feel them as they really were.

“That was never him, Matt,” Wade said. “He never loved you, hon. He used you then and he’s using you now. And he’s hurting you. He’s hurting you so bad. He’s scaring you. And I can’t let him scare you, you know I can’t.”

Red sniffed hard and nodded frenetically.

“You’re right,” he said. “He’d hit me for this.”

Never again.

“He’ll know in twenty minutes what’s happened, Wade.”

Don’t be scared.

“He’ll go to my place.”

Just lay here.

“He loves me now.”

Come on, just lay here.

“And I’m so fucked up, I think I still love him back.”

The world never changes in a day, sweetheart.

Come, just be safe.

You’re allowed to be safe and soft and unviolated for those crimes.

He left Red to sleep off the emotions start to the day and went out into the living room to find Peter peeking out the kitchen window.

Smart boy.

He knew better than to cross that sill.

“Come here, you.”

Peter jerked and looked back at him and then scrambled off the countertop. He hurried forward to give Wade as big of a hug as he could without invoking the super-strength.

“You’re gettin’ tall, kid,” Wade said even though he wasn’t.

It didn’t matter.

They’d look closer at it when there was more breathing room.

“Matt’s crying,” Peter told him. “He cries a lot now. He does it when I can’t see him.”

Yeah, he did, didn’t he, champ?

“Who’s Foggy?”

Sharp. This little one; sharper than a blade. He must have started analyzing the second Wade picked him up from Red’s place.

“Foggy’s someone who’s hurt me, you, and Matt more than anyone ever had the right to,” Wade told him. “Let’s make breakfast.”

Peter let Wade pull away from him and start poking around through the fridge.

“Foggy’s the Kingpin?” he asked.

Foggy the Kingpin.

Ha.

Dumb name for a dumb motherfucker.

“Foggy’s the Kingpin,” Wade said.

Peter gave nothing away. He came over as Wade pulled out a carton of eggs and hooked hands on his arm to get his attention.

“He hurt Matt?” he asked.

“He hurt Matt,” Wade confirmed. “And then did a 180 and saved him, and now he’s using him as a weapon and a shield.”

He waited to see how this went down.

It was hard to know with the kid. He’d found the bodies of both his aunt and his uncle. He’d pulled even more out from under buildings and rubble. He’d picked his way through them when he swept in under the Kingpin’s exposed belly and slammed those tiny knuckles of his up, again and again, into that space, shaking the rafters of that basement empire.

But Peter’s pupils didn’t dilate out and he didn’t start clicking. He just stared, empty as always.

“Are you gonna kill him?” he finally asked.

Oh.

Well, baby.

Yes.

That was the plan.

“Okay. Does that mean that I can go back to school again?”

…They’d see. It depended on how the power vacuum filled itself.

Peter frowned.

“I want to go to school again,” he said.

He’d be in sixth grade.

Wade set the cartoon of eggs down and swept the kid up off the ground and set him on the counter by the stove.

“One day, you’ll go to school again,” he said. “And Matt will be safe. And you will be safe. But first, baby-boy, you’ve gotta help me do something. You know what that is?”

Peter swung his feet.

“Kill the Kingpin?” he asked. 

Close.

“Crack some eggs,” Wade told him.


	5. poisonality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “What happened,” Mike asked without asking.  
> “You know a guy named Franklin Nelson?” Wade asked.  
> “Yes,” Mike said tonelessly.  
> “How well do you know him?”  
> “Man saved my brother’s life. We owe him—I owe him.”  
> …Interesting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> enter: Mike Murdock 
> 
> (If you don't know Mike here you go: https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Michael_Murdock_(Fragment)_(Earth-616)  
> He's a real boy in this fic. And a real assassin ❤

Red was spending the day inside, Wade informed him of this and took his rumpled hair and slow blink over his coffee as confirmation that he knew why that order was both imperative and non-negotiable at the present time.

“Are you taking Peter?” he asked.

Peter came flying out from the pantry to latch himself hopefully around Wade’s waist. He stared up with huge black eyes.

“Apparently,” Wade sighed down at him.

Peter flung himself away from him and hip-checked the doorframe in his hurry to find his shoes. Red waited until he was out of earshot.

“Where?” he asked.

“Babe, I need you to trust me,” Wade hummed, reaching out and stroking the side of Red’s cheek.

“He knows, Wade,” Red said urgently. “He has to know.”

“Do you trust me?” Wade asked.

Red’s shoulders sagged.

“If he reports me missing, we’ve got 24 hours,” he said.

Atta boy. There was that good ol’ fightin’ spirit.

“That’s plenty of time,” Wade said, just as Peter arrived in the doorway again, triumphantly holding up his battered sneakers.

Red shrugged a shoulder and tilted his jaw up for the kiss Wade laid on it.

“Trust me,” Wade said. “I know just who we need to be talkin’ to.”

“Don’t let him eat weeds,” Red said.

Yeah, yeah, whatever.

“Peter.”

Peter turned back to him with a slack, innocent expression.

“Gimme,” Wade said.

That innocence went to pitiful in an instant.

Peter handed over the dandelion.

“For blowing,” Wade told him firmly. “Not for eating. _Not_ for eating. There’re bugs in these things.”

Peter gazed up at him with zero understanding of how that could possibly be anything but a bonus.

A smoothie. He needed a smoothie.

Not bugs. For fuck’s sake, Redthew. Stop encouraging this shit.

Wade dragged him away from the chain-link fence and gave him his phone to play with while they waited for the bus.

Peter was old enough to know when he was doing weird shit, but not old enough to know how to resist those impulses, and so Wade had to grab the back of his sweatshirt anytime they passed dogs on the street so he’d stop trying to sniff them and then lash out to assert dominance over them.

That worked until a few blocks from the target destination when Pete figured out that the sweatshirt was but a skin that he could wriggle out of with minimal effort.

Wade caught him by the wrist before he could spring away.

“Hon, I need you to be steady,” he said.

That got kiddo’s attention.

“Goin’ down?” he asked.

Yeah, baby.

Goin’ down.

Mike Murdock lived and breathed and worked in the underbelly of New York City. Wade passed him occasionally when picking up cards for potential marks.

He looked _just_ like Red. Top to bottom. Same height, same-ish weight, same hair, same eyebrows—they were identical in everything but the smirk.

And the cruelty.

And the willingness to stoop.

Mike Murdock was an opportunist. A vulture.

Your guy if you needed a job done and you needed it done _now_.

Mike didn’t clean up after himself; that was your problem if you hired him. But Mike also didn’t ask any questions and he wasn’t scared of a damn soul.

People called his brother ‘the man without fear,’ but down below, it was clear to anyone who passed coinage and handshakes with the guy that they were looking into the eyes of a true Daredevil.

The fact that the rumor-mill hadn’t connected Mike Murdock to the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen was a testament to the Undercity and Red’s ability to keep a goddamn secret.

The fact that Mike Murdock was known as a man in his own league, however, was all a making of his own. Mike’s twin brother was all but a joke down here. Just a cheap laugh at Mike’s insistence that he was ‘the evil twin.’

When Red had finally taken off his mask for the first time in Wade’s presence, Wade had honestly thought that someone had slammed a pipe into Mike’s head and given him nocturnal amnesia.

But Red’s more gentle tones and hand-wringing was too genuine to be an act. And he’d perked up when Wade had said that he wasn’t gonna believe it, but he knew someone who looked like his carbon copy.

“Oh, Mikey,” Red had said, plain as day.

Wade might have lost a few years off his seemingly endless life.

He might have, later on down the line, with the memory of Red’s lips on his own and their hands intertwined, cornered Mike Murdock and told him that he ever got any ideas about drawing the good twin into any of his schemes, he’d be a dead man walking.

This had perhaps been a poor decision to make. Non-strategic. A lick emotional.

Mike’s eyes had gone cold and there had been a bang. And Wade came back to the world of the living wrapped in an ancient carpet, on the way to a dumpster.

He and Mike had had words again.

And that motherfucker had stabbed him in his femoral artery.

The third time was a charm with Mike Murdock.

The third time, Mike wasn’t even pissed off. He was just agitated that he couldn’t put an end to an affair that he called ‘a fuckin’ abomination.’

He told Wade that he’d cut off his dick if he so much as looked at his brother and Wade had cackled when he told him it was a bit late for that.

Mike had decided, rather simply, then that that was it.

Wade was going to have to drown.

Their relationship had improved since then. Begrudgingly. On both of their parts. It helped that Red and Mike, while inseparable when in the same room, seldom walked the same asphalt and pavement. Mike had the underbelly and Red had Hell’s Kitchen and they were content with that divide.

When Peter had entered the equation, Mike had been alarmed and had taken great pains to come up and try to convince Red that the whole thing was a bad idea headed for heartbreak, but even he was weak for Red’s grip around his wrist and the way that he said, “I know it might hurt, but it’s the right thing to do.”

Wade didn’t tell Peter they were going to find Mike.

It was the right thing to do.

For now.

Mike lived in a shitty complex that was loud with moaning and cursing and tvs blaring through walls. His door was 611 and Wade knocked on it, feeling strange to have come to these parts in the daytime.

They didn’t look dirty or anything.

Everything just looked tired. Nothing like it did at night.

He snapped to drag Peter’s attention away from the spiderwebs lining the ceiling of the hallway. It took three to get the kid back on track and by then, Wade realized that Mike still hadn’t answered.

Only a pounding would wake people up in these parts.

He banged a closed fist against the door this time and carried on until a hoarse voice finally said, “ _Jesus_ , you fuckhead. I’m comin’. You better have a warrant or else your mama’s gonna be askin’ for an inquest.”

Peter’s attention was immediately procured.

Oh, how he loved Mike.

The door opened and Mike Murdock’s rumpled, heated, blue gaze sneered out into the hall, then up to Wade.

He swore.

“The hell do you want?” he asked.

“Uncle Mike!”

He froze and turned slowly, grimacing all the while, towards Peter’s smile.

“Oh, fuck no,” he said.

Peter loved Mike.

That is, loved to try to bite the shit out of him.

It was a problem. They were working on it.

There was just something about Mike that made Peter want to make venom. It was enough that Wade and Red had weekly rituals of making the kid bite down on a plastic-covered jar mouth to get him to reduce the amount of acid he was packing, but around certain people—with zero rhyme or reason--the Spider Behavior ratcheted up to eleven and Mike was, unfortunately for him, one of them.

He was trying to love Peter. Peter was technically his nephew now.

But even Wade could see how the little guy’s mutation made that task a monumental one.

“Someone better have died,” Mike said, carefully keeping as much of the door as possible between him and Pete.

Wade looked up to him with seriousness.

“Someone might be about to,” he said.

Mike met his gaze.

He moved back.

“Come in,” he said.

“No? Not good?” Mike asked.

Peter shook his head back and forth furiously.

“I don’t know what to do for you then,” Mike said, leaning far over the counter to take the packet of skittles from Wade’s hand.

Peter struggled against Wade’s opposite forearm and whined.

He wanted a hug.

He was not getting a hug. For the safety of everyone in this room and for the security of the favor Wade was about to ask.

“You must have been curious,” Wade said. “Your brother disappears for a month and shows up with a new partner.”

Mike sniffed and dropped the skittles pack into the key bowl on the end of the counter.

“Not my business what he does or who with,” he said.

Peter sunk his teeth into Wade’s sleeve gently.

Mike recoiled.

This wasn’t conversation wasn’t happening with the two of them together.

“You got a park near here?” Wade asked.

The child was now preoccupied with burying himself under woodchips. Mike’s face, slightly more expressive than Matt’s, remained drawn as he watched this behavior.

“Someone needs to write a book on this shit,” he said.

“He’s not okay,” Wade said.

“Obviously not,” Mike said. “Look at him. There’s gotta be cat shit in that box. What’s he even hiding from? Kid gets more spidery every-fuckin-day, Wilson.”

“Matt,” Wade clarified. “Matt’s not okay.”

Now there was the cold-blooded murderer face Wade was looking for.

“What happened,” Mike asked without asking.

“You know a guy named Franklin Nelson?” Wade asked.

“Yes,” Mike said tonelessly.

“How well do you know him?”

“Man saved my brother’s life. We owe him— _I_ owe him.”

…Interesting.

“Where were you?” Wade asked. “When it all went down?”

Mike jerked his face back toward Peter and sniffed.

“Jail,” he said.

Huh.

“What charge?”

“Bein’ a chump.”

Hm.

“Drugs?”

“It ain’t any of your damn business, Wilson.”

“Your brother needed you,” Wade said.

“And I wasn’t fucking there, I know. I got it. Loud and clear. Thanks,” Mike said. “I’m the one who picked up the pieces of that shitshow, by the way. In case anyone was asking. Got out and went right back to him, alright? We’re fine. We’re good. We just…drifted. For a second. It happens to everyone.”

It happens to certain people more than most, actually, but Wade wasn’t here for philosophy.

“What do you owe Nelson?” he asked.

Mike frowned at him.

“The fuck’s the deal with Nelson?” he asked. “Guy’s the only son of a local hardware joint. Lawyered up to get ahead in the world. Nothin’ wrong with that. He looked after Matty for ages. They were buddies. Graduated together, you know? Matt had a fat crush on him—I think they fooled around once, but he couldn’t work up the nerve to fess up before graduation.”

“Matt told you that?”

Mike blew out a heavy breath.

“He don’t tell me shit,” he said.

Right.

Mike was used to reading being the lines. Reading silences.

Red wasn’t good at talking about himself, only others.

“Nelson brought him home,” Wade said. “But Red ain’t calling him ‘Nelson.’ He’s got another name for him. Starts with a ‘k’ and ends with an ‘ingpin.’”

Mike’s top lip twitched.

“Where is he?” he asked.

“He’s been running errands like yours,” Wade said.

“Wade.”

“Picked him up yesterday and he’s got scars. Conditioning’s there. New shit. Not the usual shit. He ain’t want anyone to touch the skin on his sides.”

“ _Wade_. You know who I mean.”

“Probably at the office he set up with your dear brother,” Wade said.

Mike’s face was eerily pale in the sunlight. His eyelashes were somehow different from Red’s, despite them being the same shape.

“Surveillance,” he said.

“He’s using Red as a cover,” Wade said. “And he’s turning him towards bigger and bigger jobs. He knows about Peter, knows what he is and who he is. Spend two weeks groomin’ the kid while he was keepin’ his new pet docile.”

“Jesus Christ. That motherfucker. That _motherfucker_. I should have—FUCK.”

There was nothing to do about the past, Mike. That guilt was just gonna have to fester.

“Matty, you’re stronger than this. Matty,” Mike groaned, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes.

“He’s not what you’re thinking,” Wade said. “He’s done the whole deal on his own, Mike.”

“Can’t be,” Mike said. “They use different people. Fisk’s got people for this. Nelson—fuck. He’s _that_ Nelson—goddamnit--”

“Are you one of them?” Wade asked. “The people Fisk uses for shit like that? Conditioning, I mean.”

The foot between them on the bench became an ocean.

Mike turned back his way with eyes that had changed from ice to seas. Turbulent. Relentless.

He stood up.

“Take me to my fuckin’ brother,” he said.

Red recognized his twin’s step. He threw open the door before Wade had even started to get out his keys and in no time, the two of them were locked in a brutal embrace.

Peter cocked his head at this. Wade grabbed him before he seized the opportunity for a nibble while Mike’s guard was down.

“MOTHERFUCKER.”

Peter vibrated at the table at the muffled cursing. The wall might have been thick enough to cover up Wade and Matt’s more tame love-sessions when the kid was around, but it wasn’t enough to contain the indominable rage of the second Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.

Wade tapped at the laptop in front of the kid.

“School,” he reminded him.

“I’M GONNA KILL HIM,” Mike burst out in the other room.

“Michael. Watch your—oh my god— _volume_ —” Matt’s softer voice scolded.

“I’m gonna _kill_ him. I’m gonna _skin_ him. I’m gonna _boil him like A FUCKIN’ LOBSTER_.”

“Uncle Mike’s hot today,” Peter said, beaming.

That he was.

“Is he an egg?” Peter asked.

Wade looked up from his tablet.

“Mike? No. Not an egg,” he said.

“Who’s an egg, then?” Peter asked.

Oh, you know.

Just a little guy called ‘Wilson Fisk.’

Red’s attempts to calm his twin looked like bodily laying on him until Mike settled down enough to demand to see the scars. He catalogued them, which was a process punctuated with Mike throwing himself out of the room towards the door and Matt lurching out after him to seize him around the chest and drag him back before he went out and did something stupid.

This went on for about half an hour before Mike emerged from the bedroom, far calmer than Wade thought he would be, and asked Wade if he had any whiskey.

Wade did.

Half a glass of liquor soothed Mike’s boiling rage to the point where he’d turned to violently cuddling Peter.

Peter, of course, approved of this. Mike’s skin was right there in front of his face, ripe for the picking.

Red tried to reason with his sibling, but all he could get out of him was ‘I’m committing homicide tonight, don’t talk to me.’

It was not overly helpful.

What was helpful, however, was the point where Peter asked Mike why he didn’t like ‘Mr. Nelson.’

Mike told him to call the guy only ‘Mr. Fuckhead the Fourth’ in his presence and then laid out, rather beautifully, Wade had to say, a complicated series of warring factions and skirmishes between different syndicates in the city.

Mike’s boss, Wilson Fisk, did not like Franklin Nelson.

Wilson Fisk, as a matter of fact, was in the process of trying to evict Franklin Nelson from his high horse in the carousel that was Hell’s Kitchen. He wanted to take that pinky ring that Nelson wore and slam it into his eye.

Mike didn’t give two shits about Wilson Fisk, of course. Mike only cared about job security in these tumultuous times, but the thought that Franklin Nelson had potentially taken notice of, not just Fisk, but specifically _Mike_ and had seen an opportunity there to disable one of Fisk’s more competent hounds through that hound’s litter mate, was a personal insult.

Mike was furious at the thought that Fisk, too, might have noticed Nelson using Matt as his own hunting dog and that he’d held onto this information, likely to use later when he needed to test Mike’s loyalty or even better, when he decided that he needed a matching set of devils.

Mike didn’t do well with being viewed as a tool.

Red was used to it, having been broken down and built up multiple times now, but Mike’s pride burned brighter than his.

“We? Us? Here, and now? Don’t belong to them,” Mike told Red viciously. “You don’t belong to them. I don’t belong to them. We’re not—we’re people, Matty. Remember?”

Red was sheepish when he lied and said that he did.

Mike wasn’t satisfied with this.

“You can’t—you’ve gotta—UGH,” he said. “Matt, you can’t just let shit happen to you. You’re not alone, you have to reach out. You _have_ to.”

Yea, he did.

But he didn’t know how. And up until then, all reaching and screaming out had gotten him was more abuse, and Wade couldn’t be angry with him for that.

“You can’t just bow your head to the first guy who pretends to care about you,” Mike carried on. “We’ve talked about this.”

“I know,” Red said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, it’s not your fault.”

“It feels like my fault.”

“Well, it’s not.”

“Then who’s fault is it?” Red asked softly.

Mike’s anger eased off a little when he looked back to his brother’s hollow gaze.

“It’s theirs,” he said.

“I don’t know how to fix this,” Red admitted, tugging Peter up from the floor where he’d settled to avoid Mike’s erratic moving and pulling him into his arms. Peter let himself be held.

Mike worked his jaw and then turned to stare Wade in the eye over the back of the living room couch.

“Nelson is avoiding Fisk,” he said.

Wade raised a brow.

“But Fisk is chasing Nelson?” he asked.

“Fisk wants him out of the way,” Mike confirmed. “But he has to be the one who does it. Or else the guys under Nelson won’t yield and move over.”

Hm.

Finnicky.

“Nelson knows me.”

Red lifted his face.

“No, he doesn’t,” he said.

“Well, then he’s gonna,” Mike told him. “But that means that Fisk’s gotta know you, Matt.”

Red frowned.

“Fisk’s territory is Queens,” he said. “Out of my boundaries.”

“Fisk’s from these parts, though,” Mike said. “He wants to have them both.”

“He ain’t havin’ ‘em both,” Red said.

“No, he ain’t,” Mike said. “But Nelson’s not avoiding Fisk because he’s scared. He’s avoiding him because he’s doesn’t think he’s even worth his time. It makes Fisk _mad_ , man. ‘Cause he wants the Kitchen bad and he don’t like to be looked down upon by a guy micromanaging a single square mile.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Red asked.

“Well, dear brother,” Mike said. “It means that you and me are sitting between two men and their egos and one of their egos is far more fragile and volatile than the other. Nelson doesn’t get dirty. Nelson plays mind games. But Fisk? Fisk gets dirty. So he’ll play dirty. Which means that if we convince Nelson that I got you to switch sides, we can get those two meatheads to fight it out between themselves.”

Red blinked.

“That’ll just make him more invested in me,” he said.

“Bub, I got news for you,” Mike said. “He’s already unbelievably invested in you.”

“I want to be away from him, Mike,” Red said. “I don’t want him to fight for me. When I’m with him it’s…wrong. Everything’s wrong. And weirdly…”

“Easy,” Wade finished for him.

Matt couldn’t even bring himself to acknowledge the word.

“I don’t trust myself,” he said. “If he’s there, I don’t—I owe him, Mike.”

“Yeah, well. That’s why you got me,” Mike said. “Here’s how we’re gonna do it. I’m gonna go to Nelson. I’m gonna say that I took you and our mutual Spider friend here in under orders from Fisk. Then you’re gonna come with me to meet Fisk, we’re both gonna make a pledge or somethin’, and then, when Fisk tries to use you to lure Nelson over, we wait for him to approach and then we fuck off and leave them to duke it out. Easy as that.”

Red groaned.

“Then that’ll be _two_ kingpins who want us all dead,” he said.

Mike scoffed.

“Are you kiddin’?” he asked. “Nelson won’t let you die, Matty. He’s got _feelings_ for you. You said it yourself. He wants you alive and he wants you to be his, and he’ll do whatever it takes to keep you within reach. If that means overthrowing Fisk, he’ll do it.”

“You can’t know that,” Red said, brushing Peter’s hair with his hands.

“No,” Mike said. “But I got a hell of a hunch and a bit of a daredevil kind of personality, you know what I mean?”

Red directed the flattest face he could muster just past his brother’s shoulder.

“You want to gamble,” he said.

“Hell yeah, dude,” Mike told him. “You got a better idea?”

Red turned towards Wade to plead with him with his face.

“He’s your brother,” Wade said. “It’s y’all’s battle. I’m just here to watch the kid and carry the ammo while you get revenge or whatever.”

Red was not comforted. Peter leaned back into him and hummed.

“I don’t know Fisk,” he said.

Mike recoiled.

“What? No,” he said. “You know Fisk, kiddo.”

Peter looked up at him. And Mike, uncharacteristically, held out a hand for Peter to take hold of.

“He’s the one who killed your aunt, honey,” Mike said. “Not Nelson. Don’t you remember?”

Wade felt the air leave his lungs.

Red pulled Peter in closer to him. Peter said nothing for a long time. His took his hand away from Mike and flexed his fingers around Red’s arm instead.

“He killed May?” he realized softly.

“You didn’t,” Red said at Mike.

Mike was confused. He shook his head.

“Found out later,” he said. “It was, uh. Shocking. Honestly. I thought—I thought that’s why Pete here was always trying to end me. Some guy named Connors got Fisk to order it. He kept saying she knew too much. I’m—I’m sorry. I thought you guys—I thought you knew? If I’d have known that you didn’t know--”

Jesus.

Jesus, lord. 

“He killed May,” Peter said in a cracking voice.

No, no, kiddo. Don’t cry.

Red’s arms constricted even tighter around the kid; his eyebrows sunk low.

“If it came to the two of them—Fisk and Foggy,” he asked his brother. “Who do you think would win out?”

Mike shook his head.

“No one knows,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what? If either of them kills the other, that’s not the worst thing. The last man standing will be one hell of a target in the aftermath. If nothing else, he’ll be too busy to spend his time fucking around with us and so the tables’ll be ready for a turnin’.”

Finally.

Some fucking facts in this household.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have unexpectedly started to try to make a plot.  
> I did not anticipate this.  
> Huzzah?


	6. double take

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael stepped away from him when he approached.
> 
> “I’m not playing your games,” he said.
> 
> Foggy tsked.
> 
> “You’re confused, hon,” he said with a sharp smile. “You’re mixing me up with your employer. This kingpin doesn’t play games.”

Matthew’s desk sat empty by the window and Foggy watched the stripe of sunlight that illuminated it stretch wider and wider across it and the seat of Matthew’s chair throughout the day until it was left in nothing but darkness.

He paused to stand at door every time he passed by it. And each time, just for a moment, the weight and dryness of the folders in his hands seemed to vanish.

Loss.

It was loss that he was feeling.

Matthew’s rough fingers and scraped cheekbones were missing from this cramped, chasm-like office that Foggy’s heart had decided, rather insidiously if he might add, to start calling ‘home.’

He’d tried to purge that feeling.

The only home that he’d ever cared about couldn’t be quantified in walls, but rather in blocks, neon signs, and twisting alleys.

Hell’s Kitchen was home. Things were not allowed to be more complicated than that, otherwise Foggy might start to form attachments.

Still, the loss of Matthew’s body in his presence echoed, and Foggy traced his fingers across the edges of the layered paper in his arms while he watched the sun splay itself across that empty desk.

He tore himself away.

There was work to be done.

Without Matthew there to share the burden, the pace of clients and paperwork and emails and scheduling was relentless. The secretary whose name Foggy had procured from the cashier of a coffee shop (as it had been ages since he’d seen someone circling wanted ads in newspaper) was doing her best, but even her high degree of competence could not slow Hell’s Kitchen’s grinding stone of poverty.

There were so many cases.

Foggy found himself holding his head in the few minutes that it took for one set of clients to exit his office and another to replace them.

He caught himself pinching the bridge of his nose while clients bled their hearts out on the desk between him and them.

His legal pad was finished. His tissue boxes empty.

He had a list of fourteen emails he needed to send and three to follow up on. And if he was being completely plain here—completely honest—with zero audience, including the kingpin who lived in his head, counting steps and bullets in chambers everywhere he went—

This shit was overwhelming.

Sitting here with crying grandmas and _nonas_ and _abuelas_ and bubbes and all these damn children and all these damn twenty-somethings and working people making their livings at driving taxis and selling cellphones and manning bodegas and corner groceries—good _God_.

It was easier to run a criminal empire than to sit and frown and nod and write and process all of these complicated stories while coming up with feasible solutions that didn’t make the tellers of those stories sniff and tilt their heads in confusion.

Foggy was a lawyer, yes. He’d gone to school for this. He’d suffered the extra three years of education for this, and had even, like a true masochist, considered going back for an LL.M, but thankfully had decided in the end that he made more money and connections out of school than in.

But all those years of school had done fuck all to prepare him to sit across from a 16 year old mother with tears in her eyes, saying that she’d been referred to him by her shelter and her father was trying to get custody of her child.

The Kingpin could resolve this child’s issue by merely taking down this man’s name. He’d be dealt with swiftly and cleanly and this child would be his sole heir and the inheritor of all his meager assets: problem solved.

The lawyer, however, had to become a lion, jumping through all these hoops lit on fire, trying to find a name at some firm that did family law better than he did family law to hand to this girl. And then he had to take a bow and send her away with the dissatisfaction and indignity of another job leaving his orbit unfinished.

Foggy caught himself grinding his teeth on his half an hour break for lunch, scrolling through the google results for LL.M programs again.

He recoiled and closed the window as fast as he could and then held his heart for a second to still the shock-induced pounding there.

He expected a visitor once the office closed shop, although the headache that had come on around noon was displeased when said visitor chose to wait until six to make themselves known.

Foggy busied himself in the meantime with those emails.

He heard the door creak open at two after six and he decided to simply keep typing.

The grinding stone waited for no man. His visitor was no exception.

And anyways, Foggy had narrowed down the list of possibilities for this person’s identity to a few reasonable suspects.

Matthew was a sweet thing with an open face and a number of hulking men who favored him for that. Frank Castle, for example, the filthy bastard. Wade Wilson was another. And the third, well.

The third was a long-time acquaintance of Foggy’s you might say.

The third slunk into the room, making the familiar tap-tap-tap of Matthew’s stick. And he did a remarkable impression of Matthew’s head sweeping gestures.

But he was not his brother.

Matthew knew better than to underestimate Foggy’s mental catalogue of his behaviors. He was smarter than that. He knew that this plan wouldn’t work, which was why he hadn’t come along. But Foggy didn’t need to tell Michael that.

Instead, Foggy could stay typing at his desk and say, “Well, look what the cat’s finally dragged in. How nice of you to come back to pick up your end of the slack. The Saburo case is yours, I’m out of binderclips and patience.”

Michael was caught off-guard.

Evidently he hadn’t counted on Foggy doing the heavy lifting around this joint. And actually, Foggy hadn’t counted on that either.

What was he doing? He was off the clock. And more than that, he _made_ the clock. What the fuck. No. No more emails. This whole thing was supposed to be a front.

“I’m sorry?” Michael said in an infuriatingly soft and honed impression of Matthew’s voice.

“I _said_ ,” Foggy said, rolling his eyes, “The Saburo case is _yours_ , Matty. It’s housing. You love housing. I’m giving you all of the housing cases—in exchange for binderclips.”

Michael was caught. His disguise was already fading with his shock. Foggy looked up his way and furrowed his brow.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “You still feeling sick? We talked about this; no bleeding on communal surfaces.”

What’s the matter, Mr. Murdock?

Didn’t expect this Kingpin to get his hands dirty?

“I’m not Matt,” Michael said stiffly. 

Foggy made a point to jerk back in surprise.

“Oh,” he said slowly. “Did you…uh, hit your head there, pal?”

“Stop this act,” Michael rumbled.

He let the stick fall from his hand. It clattered against the floor loudly in the stillness of the now-empty office. Foggy watched it, then lifted his face to Michael’s.

Michael removed his sunglasses and with them his composure.

His lips curled around canine teeth just ever so slightly thinner than Matthew’s.

“Woah,” Foggy said, getting up from his desk and holding hands out in front of him. “Let’s take it easy, Matty. You drunk?”

“STOP. THIS,” Michael ordered. “You piece of shit—you _fucking coward_. You _animal_.”

Hm.

Okay.

If that’s what he really wanted.

“If that’s what makes you happy, Michael,” Foggy said.

Michael’s eyes widened.

“Nice to meet you, by the way,” Foggy told him as he moved out from behind the desk. “We never did meet in person.”

Michael stepped away from him when he approached.

“I’m not playing your games,” he said.

Foggy tsked.

“You’re confused, hon,” he said with a sharp smile. “You’re mixing me up with your employer. This kingpin doesn’t play games.”

Michael flared his nostrils.

“I’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done to my brother,” he said.

Foggy leaned into his space just to watch him force himself not to recoil. It was kind of fun. He got why those other pathetic fucks gave into the urge. But that wasn’t his style.

He’d never cared for playing with his food. Honestly was the best policy in his ranks. Failure to be transparent would only create problems for everyone. See: the Spider situation. That had, at least, been recently resolved.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Michael,” Foggy said. “You know, this is the second time I’ve saved your brother’s life. And I can’t help noticing that you weren’t there. Again.”

He smiled at Michael’s slowly lowering eyebrows.

“You were even a free man this time,” he added.

“I want to make a deal, Kingpin,” Michael said.

Foggy laughed.

“I’m not making a deal with you,” he said. “You’re small fry, Mike. Just a handyman.”

“You want my brother,” Michael said. “I know you do, Nelson. You want him bad, don’t you?”

How dare he.

Well.

Two could play at that game.

“Yes, Mike, I want him. Not you, though,” Foggy said, “You’re—well, nothing personal, but I need Daredevil. The A-team. Not the B-team, if you know what I mean.” 

Michael’s eyes were losing color fast and Foggy could just about laugh.

“You have no idea what you’re messing with,” Michael said. “You think—"

“No, honey, _you_ thought. You thought you could come in here and intimidate me?” Foggy asked. “Adorable. Truly. Here’s the thing, though: I don’t need you. Or Matthew. You, him, this firm—all of it is a matter of convenience. And, like your employer, Mike, you’ve made the mistake in thinking that I care enough about any of you to hear you through. If you want to keep your brother away: okay. Go ahead. His name will stay on this door and over time, people will notice that he’s gone. And oh, ‘poor Matthew,’ I’ll have to say, ‘he disappeared and I just keep waiting for him to come home, but the police tell me that every hour he’s gone, the more likely it is that he’s dead.’ And oh, _poor Matthew_ , what will he do when I take his name off that sign, Mike? Where will he go when all he has left is Daredevil? What will his devil do when it has nothing to balance it on the other side of things? Will it consume him, like it’s consumed you, Michael?”

A muscle in Michael’s jaw jumped.

He was not his brother.

“If you don’t need any of us, then why didn’t you let him die?” he asked.

Insolent.

“Because he’s pretty,” Foggy said. “And I like to look at him while he cries.”

Michael’s eyes found their color and his face began to flush. Wow, look at all those freckles. Where had they been hiding?

Foggy laughed and shook his head.

“Your deal hasn’t worked, friend,” he said. “I’m not entering into an agreement with pond-scum. Tell Matthew that I’ll be waiting for him when he’s ready to come back and tell him that I’m disappointed.”

He paused and smoothed a hand over his knuckles, then flicked his eyes up and grinned at Michael.

He was frozen with rage.

It was a good look on him.

Jealously. Resentment. Guilt.

Matty was supposed to be his to protect. What kind of brother was he that he couldn’t even manage this?

“He’ll join me at Fisk’s side,” Michael said. “Go fuck yourself, Nelson.”

Hm.

Well, that wouldn’t do. Fisk was a cesspit and Foggy had just invested a great deal of time and money into scrubbing Matthew clean.

“Go then,” Foggy said, spinning the ring on his knuckle. “Although, it would be a shame for Fisk to find out the Spider’s name and the school he’s enrolled at.”

Michael went stiff.

Foggy hummed.

“He doesn’t like him much does he—Fisk, I mean?” he asked. “That’s fine. Peter’s a strange kid. I don’t blame Fisk for his disgust. I will say that Peter is not what I thought he was, so you can rest assured that my faction won’t bother with him anymore.”

Peter was easy to sway. He was young. Trusting. And regardless of whatever garbage Mike had been spewing at him, he would learn soon enough what side aligned with his grief and interests.

He was a smart boy under all that clicking.

“You stay the fuck away from the kid,” Michael said.

“I just said I would,” Foggy reminded him. “On the condition, of course, that you keep your brother away from the likes of Wilson Fisk. What do you say, Mike? Do we have a deal?”

He’d come for one, after all, hadn’t he?

Michael sneered at him.

“I’ll kill you,” he said. “But before I do, I’m gonna give you a scar for every one you left on my brother. Go rot in hell, Kingpin.”

“Nice doing business with you, too,” Foggy said.

Michael left the building. Foggy waited a good half an hour before leaving.

Michael Murdock was known to be rash and heavy handed in the undercity and while Foggy didn’t believe that he would turn back to try something stupid, he himself was also no under any illusions that either of the Murdocks could be completely trusted when they were riled up.

He fully anticipated Michael to come find him on the short walk home and he was rewarded for his foresight.

Mike was waiting for him six blocks down, sat on the stoop in front of Foggy’s building.

He was sweatier now. Bloody knuckles.

He must have gone to find a wall to take his rage out on.

Hm. Interesting.

“Not done yet?” Foggy asked him, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

“Nah,” Michael said as he unfolded himself from his perch. “I just forgot one thing that I came to tell you.”

Foggy quirked his lips up and hummed.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m listening. It won’t change my mind, whatever it is.”

Michael’s own lips stretched into a smirk.

“I don’t know, Kingpin,” he said softly. “But what I do know is that there might be a chance that when I was repairing the damage that you’ve done, Matty might have let slip something I don’t think he’s even told you.”

What.

Not possible.

Matthew had no more secrets. Foggy had scrubbed him clean of that behavior.

“Are you sure?” Michael asked. “Because I heard—well. I mean, if you already know it, then I won’t waste your time—”

Stupid games. They weren’t children.

“So don’t. Move,” Foggy ordered.

Michael surveyed him slowly, then stepped aside. He purposefully stood close enough that Foggy’s shoulder brushed his when he strode past.

“He used to love you too, you know,” Mike murmured.

Foggy’s heart seized.

He turned back.

But Mike was gone.


	7. sinking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter brought a hand to his face so that he could drum a few fingers against his nose.
> 
> “He killed her,” he whispered.
> 
> “He’s not worth the effort, child,” Foggy said. “You’re much more valuable to this city than he is.”
> 
> “He killed her, Foggy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in which the tide begins to turn.

Ten days.

Foggy told the clients that there had been a death in Matthew’s family. They call cooed and simpered and sent cards that spoke of condolences and grief on his behalf. Foggy smiled and accepted them and stacked them up in his desk drawer next to the collection of binder clips he’d been forced to steal from Matthew’s.

He found himself agitated on the fifth day. Agitated upon realizing that he’d been trapped in this cramped shoebox for five days straight and somehow, on the morning slog to damn place, he’d forgotten that he could simply choose not to arrive.

It was a startling realization and one that caught him off guard.

He walked into the office feeling like a battered cardboard box; Ms. Page greeted him and told him that his three o’clock had called in to say that they couldn’t make it. This was the third time. Foggy’s jaw couldn’t even find it in itself to tighten in irritation.

“Wonderful,” he said emptily instead. “Well, Ms. Page if you need me, you know where I’ll be.”

In his office.

How the hell had he let things slide so far?

Ten days was as long as it took for the Spider to wriggle in through a crack in the wall and to hide under Foggy’s desk for literal hours before scrambling out while Foggy was in the bathroom.

Foggy nearly threw the boy out the window in his surprise.

“Hi,” Peter said brightly, squatting with his feet flat in the center of the desk. “Matt says I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

Excellent.

Matthew was still alive. Good to—

Wait.

“Did Matthew tell you who I am, Peter?” Foggy pressed suspiciously.

“Yeah. Wade did, too,” Peter hummed. He wrapped his arms around his knees. His hair was too long. It was starting to make waves in sheafs on top.

Foggy tipped his head slightly to the side.

“And yet you’re here,” he said.

“Why’re you keepin’ up the office?” Peter asked.

Foggy gave him a wide berth as he made his way around the desk. Peter moved fluidly in a circle, following him almost without moving his feet. Foggy considered his choices once he was facing the back of the desk.

On the one hand, files. Work. Phonecalls to make.

On the other hand, _spider_.

Matthew wasn’t here to settle the thing and smooth over his more…animal tendencies, and Foggy was 99% sure that he could carry rabies for sustained periods. 

“Foggy?”

Horrible. These were terrible options.

“You know, for a kingpin, you’re not very talkative,” Peter huffed. He plopped himself down with his legs splayed apart and held his feet tight. Foggy repressed a grimace.

“I keep up the office so that Matthew has somewhere homely to return to once he’s ready to follow you out of hiding,” Foggy explained.

Peter’s eyes started to darken. He slowly tipped his head to the side.

“Mike said that you deserve to drown in tar,” he said.

Mike would think that wouldn’t he? Aggravating obstacle. Who’d let Matthew have all these people in his life?

“But it’s weird ‘cause I’ve been watching you for a week and a half now, but you’re not doin’ kingpin things,” Peter said.

Foggy felt his spine go stiff and his shoulders jerk back.

“I’m keeping up appearances,” he said. “I’m not supposed to do kingpin things. That is the entire point of this office. It’s a ruse. And an alibi. Do you understand?”

“No.”

Fucking _children_.

“What part don’t you understand?” Foggy asked as patiently as his blood pressure could manage.

“The part where you ain’t been doin’ kingpin things.”

 _Haven’t_. Where Foggy _hadn’t_ been—

Wait.

The child had noticed? The _child_ had noticed?

Christ. God. Off track, Foggy was so far off course, he was blowing his chances. He needed to recalibrate. He needed to just leave all this nonsense behind. He had real work. He had—

“You’ve been helping people,” Peter said.

“Keeping up appearances, Peter,” Foggy said. “It’s imperative to gaining the public’s favor.”

Peter blinked and Foggy winced.

“Did Matthew send you?” he asked.

“No, he told me not to talk to you, remember?”

“Then why are you watching me?” Foggy countered.

Peter let go of his filthy, peeling sneakers and pulled himself up onto his knees. He leaned forward towards Foggy and Foggy caught himself before he took a step back.

Peter sucked in his bottom lip.

“Why’re you so scared of me?” he asked.

“Because you bite and I don’t want to die of rabies,” Foggy snapped.

“I don’t have rabies,” Peter huffed. “Wade took me to a doctor to make sure after me and a raccoon had business to take care of.”

That was not even slightly comforting.

“Is everyone scared of me?”

The question caught Foggy off-guard. He looked at Peter—really looked at him. His hair was a disaster and his eyes were nearly black and far too glossy to be anything human. He was a bag of skin and bones with knobbly joints. He had shoulders that perhaps, one day, had it in them to spread into wider wings, but for now were nothing but diminutive and sloping.

“Wilson Fisk killed my aunt,” Peter said softly.

The cogs clicked into place like clockwork.

“I knew it was a kingpin. I thought it was you at first. But Mike said it was Fisk,” Peter said. He dropped his marble eyes to the floor. “Fisk’s not scared of me,” he said. “He’s got guns. He hit me. He calls me vermin.”

“I’ve done the same,” Foggy said. “What makes me different?”

Peter lifted his face and slipped off the desk. Foggy moved back as he moved forward.

“Wilson Fisk only talks to people with money and fancy clothes,” Peter said with a frown. “But you’re down here in the shits with everyone else. Where are your fancy clothes, Foggy?”

The silver ring suddenly rediscovered its weight.

“Unnecessary,” Foggy said. “Fisk and I are different breeds of evil.”

“You were evil to Matt, but you never hurt me. Why didn’t you hurt me? You used me. But you ain’t scratched me or hit me or anything yet.”

 _Haven’t_. What was with this kid and his ‘ain’t’s. Talking like a goddamn plumber. Didn’t he understand the politics of this hellhole?

No.

No, of course he didn’t, he was fucking 12.

“Why Matt?” Peter asked.

“I don’t think you need to know,” Foggy said. “I can’t help you with Fisk. I don’t stoop.”

“Is it because you love him?”

Foggy’s breath caught in his throat.

“Wade hurts Matt because he loves him.”

He _what_?

Peter nodded.

“He goes in the room and Matt makes scared sounds,” he said.

Wh—oh. _Oh_. N—hm. This was not in the job description.

“That’s something else,” Foggy said.

“Did you hurt Matt like that?”

“One time a long, long time ago,” Foggy said. “But it’s not really any of your business. Matthew is useful to me. Daredevil is useful to me.”

“Can Spiderman be?”

 _Finally._ Foggy had been waiting for this moment, but he had to say, he hadn’t expected it to come at the end of a dance around a sex-talk.

He made a show of folding his fingers together.

“Matthew doesn’t want you talking to me, Peter,” he said.

“Matt doesn’t want me to do a lot of things,” Peter volleyed back smoothly. “It’s okay. You lie to him, too, don’t you?”

“It’s not safe to make deals with crime lords,” Foggy pointed out.

“Wilson Fisk killed her,” Peter said, more to himself than Foggy. “He killed her. Had her killed. Killed her.”

“Do you want him to die, Peter?” Foggy nudged.

Peter brought a hand to his face so that he could drum a few fingers against his nose.

“He killed her,” he whispered.

“He’s not worth the effort, child,” Foggy said. “You’re much more valuable to this city than he is.”

“He killed her, Foggy.”

Hm. Yes. He sure did.

“Do you want him dead?” Foggy asked.

“I want him to cry like I did,” Peter decided.

“And what would you be willing to trade for that?” Foggy asked carefully.

“I don’t got money.”

“Have money,” Foggy corrected compulsively.

“I don’t have money.”

Better.

“But I’ve got something else that I know that you want.”

Oh really now?

“Yeah,” Peter said. “I’ve got Matt.”

Foggy recoiled, then caught himself and gave in to the bubble of laughter in his chest. Peter’s lips tilted up in the corners.

“Let’s make a deal, Kingpin,” Peter hummed. “I bring Matt back here and you tell me how to make Wilson Fisk weep.”

Amazing.

Stupendous.

Things were really lookin’ up.

“You know what, Peter, you’ve got yourself a deal,” Foggy said. He held out a hand. “Shake on it?”

He let Peter come in close this time. His spindly hand was bony and hot in the center of the palm.

“Deal,” Peter said. “Oh, I forgot to mention just one thing.”

“Heya neighbor,” Mike oozed over the back of the new second receptionist chair. “How’s the weather out, hm?”

Foggy was going to stab him. He only had pushpins at his disposal at the moment, but by god—

“Mike,” Matthew said. “Settle down. Be professional. Ms.—uh, sorry? You name escapes me?”

“Page,” Ms. Page said brightly up at Matthew.

Matthew’s eyebrows jumped and did an interesting little jig for a moment before landing back in their original places.

“Ms. Page,” he said. “I’m sorry about him. He’s incorrigible, but it’s either this or more jailtime—”

“You ain’t takin’ me back,” Michael crooned at Karen. “Don’t let ‘em take me back, hm, Kare?”

“Ms. Page,” Ms. Page said.

“Ah, yes of course. Page, Karen, darling,” Mike hummed.

Ms. Page beamed at him. Foggy could barely contain his snarl.

This was a mistake. That little arachnid horror show was nothing but an extension of Wade Wilson’s unfathomably, infuriatingly strategic brain. And Foggy had fallen for it. Goddamn it. He was better than this. 

“Matthew,” he said. “A word.”

Matthew lifted his face and the pale, freckled skin of his neck peeked out from his collar. He looked—Foggy didn’t really want to admit it—but good. Better than before. Less pale, somehow. Less like he was perpetually on the edge of a whimper.

Aggravating. The brother had this effect on him. Mike made him bolder. _Comforted_.

It was disgusting. Matthew was most stunning when his bottom lip was hanging open and his sightless eyes were wide and pale.

Matthew drew himself up and held his stick close. Right before he followed Foggy, Mike turned back with a lazy grin and winked.

“Don’t work too hard now, boys,” he said.

A threat.

Foggy dared him to get within range. He was bringing a knife to work tomorrow.

He pressed a hand against the small of Matthew’s back just before they entered his office.

“I did not agree to this,” Foggy hissed over the desk.

Matthew let his eyebrows go bent and hurt.

“I—I don’t know if it makes—makes you feel better, but I didn’t either?” he offered.

There was a long pause.

“What do you mean you didn’t agree to this?” Foggy demanded.

Matthew’s shoulders came up and he held one palm up helplessly. The spider and Wilson had schemed it up together behind his back then.

Hm.

“This does not please me,” Foggy warned. “Mike does not scare me. Peter does not—”

“Foggy?”

Interruptions now? Look at all this hard work, all flushed down the drain after a mere eleven days. What a nightmare. This was why Foggy had kept Matthew close. This was exactly why.

“Foggy? Did you work the cases while I was gone?”

Hm? What?

Obviously. Someone had to do it and it wasn’t about to be Ms. Page, now, was it?

Matthew’s bent brows came up and his hand moved towards his heart.

“Peter said you were,” he said. “I just didn’t think it was—I thought it was below you. But thank you.”

Thank no one, Murdock. Foggy was doing this purely for himself.

“I’m renegading this deal,” Foggy snapped. “I have no time for you or that brat of yours—and especially not your brother. I’m leaving and you have two hours to evict him.”

“You can’t renegade,” Matthew said.

Oh? And why not?

“Because you don’t have two hours,” Matthew offered with a gentle hand. “We have court, Mr. Nelson. Did you forget?”

For the _love of_ god.

Okay no. No one talk. Not a single soul speak. Foggy was done. Foggy was out. Foggy was the kingpin of Hell’s Kitchen. This whole endeavor had been a failure, he saw that now. And it rankled, but so did arson sometimes. He was just going to have to let this one go.

“Foggy? Hold on, I can’t.”

Matthew slipped. Foggy jerked back and caught him before he hit pavement and dragged him upright.

“Oh. Thanks,” Matthew said. “That was surprisingly—”

Silence, peon. Foggy was plotting.

“Did you just call me ‘peon?’”

SILENCE.

What was that? Foggy knew he hadn’t heard that. He was the kingpin of Hell’s Kitchen. He would not stand for giggling in his presence, much less at himself. Explain yourself, weapon.

“We won,” Matthew said instead of following the directive. “You’re allowed to be pleased.”

“I’m not pleased,” Foggy sneered at him. “I’m plotting the location of your brother’s grave. Yours will be next to it. The child, I intend to seal in an oil drum and then send plummeting off of Niagara Falls— _why are you laughing?_ Is this a game to you, Matthew?”

“No,” Matthew said, physically scrubbing the smirk off his lips. “No, it’s not. I just. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think some of your kingpin is rubbing off?”

Some of Foggy’s kingpin?

Rubbing off?

Said who?

Where?

What did that even mean?

“Have you slept?”

Slept when? Yes, Foggy had slept. He’d slept as soon as he’d sent that moron Detective Indell at the 15th precinct a detailed list of everything he’d done wrong in the last 72 hours. It had taken some time because Indell and his ilk were all such vastly incompetent fools that they couldn’t even be bribed into a semblance of respectability. The list was extensive.

Foggy had CC’ed his Sergeant.

Matthew coughed into his fist.

“And the er, empire?” he asked.

The what? Oh. The—

 _Jesus_.

Matthew coughed again.

Foggy abandoned him at the train station with orders to return to his heathen of a sibling and the far more tolerable Ms. Karen Page. He himself took a path down into the bowels of the city.

The place was in shambles. It took three whole days to get everything back in order and to ensure that every soul that crossed Foggy’s sightlines cowered before him.

He refused to feel anything about leaving Matthew to stew in the mess of the firm office. He had more important work to do. There were bodies all over the place, maggots squirming in the woodwork. And most unfortunately, a thumb smashed right through the crust of Foggy’s pie.

He tapped a pen against his lips as he flicked through the images on the tablet in front of him.

“Sir?” the informant asked.

Hm.

“Pay him,” Foggy ordered the others.

He took the tablet with him while the informant was taken away.

It had images on it from a restaurant called Gustav’s. The windows had been smashed in the day before as the local youths expressed their feelings about the gentrification of their home streets. Foggy didn’t blame them. Gustav’s had most recently been O’Shay’s. It was a dump of a bar. Foggy remembered its red lights and the constant leak of liquid that had stained the concrete square in front of it.

Gustav’s was owned by a Russian, and not just any Russian.

Foggy snapped his fingers and signed the man’s death warrant. He handed the tablet off as the order was relayed down the chain of command.

Nice try, Wilson Fisk.

This city does not belong to you.

This was unexpected.

“He’s so cute,” Ms. Page cooed.

“Yeah, a real doll,” Mike grumbled.

Peter’s oversized hoodie buried itself further into Matt’s coat. He started clicking violently until Matthew curled a hand around the back of his head. He dragged his fingers across a document on the edge of Mike’s side of the reception desk while Peter peeked out of his side just enough to see Ms. Page wave at him.

Foggy took in the state of the place and pinched the bridge of his nose. He started counting backwards from ten.

“Mike thought it would make the place more comfortable for the clients,” Ms. Page told him brightly. “I wasn’t convinced at first, but we’ve had so many compliments.”

“I’m tellin’ ya, kids love puppets,” Mike deadpanned. “Watch this. Peter, we have a Kermit.”

The boy scrambled out from Matthew’s coat like his life depended on it. His eyes had gone completely black and all of them (including the secret ones, Foggy had no doubt) were locked on Mike. Mike began to sink slowly behind the desk like he was doing some kind of syrup-speed duck and cover drill.

“Have at it,” he said with a flicking gesture towards the new (old?) puppet stage now shoved in between the bookshelves against the far wall of the waiting area.

The rest of the space was decorated in what Foggy had no doubts was Party City’s Mardi Gras collection.

Foggy removed himself to his office to scream into his hands.

As soon as one mess was scrubbed clean, another one reared back and exploded.

How to manage this? How to cope? This office needed discipline on the double. But the other office needed supervision, constantly. Foggy was only one man. He could not be the only thing gluing these two spaces together. He refused to believe that his forces were so lax that they came undone the second his gaze left their watchtowers.

“Foggy?”

Foggy tore his head out of his hands and let out a pleasant hum of acknowledgement.

Matthew’s long fingers curled around the doorway.

“Can you read something for me?” he asked quietly.

He didn’t notice the dark. His bottom lip was slightly red from some anxious gnawing only a few seconds ago.

“Give it here,” Foggy said.

Matthew slipped in with a set of documents in hand and held them out for Foggy to take.

Foggy’s fingers had barely scraped the pages when he saw the name.

O’Shay.

And now the wires were getting crossed?

He didn’t often call upon God for intervention but he felt a corner of his brain twitch in that direction for a fraction of a second.

He read the documents out for Matthew, glancing up occasionally to watch his expression. It went stormy, then lightened, then went thunderous and finally landed on ‘confused retriever.’

“Why would someone buy out O’Shay’s?” he asked. “That place is two points from being condemned. This isn’t a wrecking company.”

“Why would anyone buy out anything?” Foggy asked. “Real estate is real estate.”

“Jacob says that he didn’t willingly sign over the deed,” Matthew said.

Mm. No, a mark in blood was probably taken as proof of receipt of payment. Not that it really mattered at this point. Gustav was Gustav the Dearly Departed—or he would be within the next 48 hours.

“Jake doesn’t want the money,” Matthew continued. “He and his family have no where to sleep.”

Ugh.

So graceless, Fisk. To leave unhappy witnesses was the easiest and worst mistake anyone could make. Unhappy witnesses talked. Unhappy witnesses asked questions. Unhappy witnesses were a needless chink in the armor of an otherwise perfectly legal exchange of property.

He could have just bought these people a new store and set them up in a cozy apartment above the place. He could have offered the Jacob O’Shay a life insurance policy six months ago—or better yet, the year previous, and burned the place and the O’Shay to ashes later on. Then the family would have gotten their payout and the one who knew the business best wouldn’t have been around to squeal.

A tragedy, yes, but not unheard of. Everyone knew that Hell’s Kitchen was full of teen arsonists and gang violence. These things did happen.

Foggy nearly put a hand to his forehead in secondhand embarrassment.

“Foggy.”

He flicked his eyes up to Matthew’s gleaming red glasses.

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t know what you want us to do about it,” Foggy hummed, tossing the documents onto his desk. “A signature’s a signature. This one’s even notarized. The only thing we can do is prove that it’s been forced or faked.”

Matthew’s chin dipped for barely a moment. Foggy watched it and stood up to shift his weight. He crossed his arms and cocked out a hip.

“What is it you need, Matty?” he asked.

Matthew jerked his head away.

“You’re lying,” he nearly whispered.

“There’s nothing to do for it,” Foggy said immediately.

“Yes, there is,” Matt snapped back, then caught himself, and recoiled in horror. “I’m—I—” he stammered.

Adorable. He was so confused. He couldn’t remember where the lines were. He needed a hand to guide him. Foggy bit the inside of his cheek and forced down those thoughts.

This was business. That building was a declaration.

“Matty,” he said softly. “You’re okay, friend. Tell me what you want.”

Matthew’s silent panic would never lose its charm.

“Tell me,” Foggy helped him when the floundering entered its fifth second. He hardened his voice. “That’s an order.”

Matthew’s struggling gave way to defeat. His hands fell to his sides like a good little soldier.

“I want to know more,” he admitted.

“Why?” Foggy demanded.

Matthew grimaced.

“Because it’s not fair,” he said.

“Nothing in life is fair, us standing here is proof,” Foggy said.

“You know what this is,” Matthew said.

Foggy scoffed.

“Of course I know what it is,” he said. “You might even say that it’s already in the works of being handled. But this isn’t how our relationship works. You work for me. Not the other way around.”

“With.”

The office’s afternoon heat made itself known in the sudden silence. Dust motes danced through the air in the light of the blinds.

“What did you say to me?” Foggy asked.

Matthew’s shoulders rolled forward.

“With,” he repeated. “You work _with_ me.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought you said. Get on your knees.”

Matthew didn’t move. Foggy felt his blood pressure tick up a notch.

“You really want to do this while your son—”

“He’s not my son,” Matthew interrupted.

Foggy’s hands longed for the skin of that throat.

“--while your _ward_ is in the other room?” he amended sweetly. “Be a doll.” He gestured to the floor and then did it again in case Matthew’s senses were tuned into the boy outside.

Matthew’s jaw hardened.

“No,” he said.

Foggy sighed.

“Matty, I don’t want to do this here,” he said.

“So don’t.”

“Don’t _tell me_ what to do,” Foggy ordered.

The flinch was satisfying.

“Get on your knees.”

Matthew went down this time, mutinously, but at this point, Foggy was done with the charade. He stepped in close and grabbed Matthew’s chin. He brought it up and snatched the glasses away so that he could see the scars around Matthew’s mottled, dark eyes.

The motion seemed to take Matt’s breath away.

“You,” Foggy told him firmly. “Live because I _choose_ for you to live. I choose to let that boy and your ridiculous brother live. I even choose whether or not Mr. O’Shay and all these baby O’Shays get to return to their lovely, renovated home. I know it’s been a moment since we’ve had this discussion, so I’m going to give you a pass this time. But just so that we’re clear: this kingpin does not work for you. Does not work _with_ you. You serve. These extra bodies are a symbol of my indulgence. Do not take my kindness for granted. Up.”

“Why?”

Foggy’s eyes rolled with the urge to slap.

“I literally just—”

“Why do you indulge me?” Matthew asked. Foggy jerked and found fingers wrapping around his wrist. They didn’t tighten. Matthew’s unfocused eyes blinked slowly.

“Is it because you want to fuck me? I can smell it, you know, your--”

The slap was louder than intended.

“You’re a tool, Matt Murdock,” Foggy told him. “Don’t you forget it.”

“I would have let you,” Matthew said as Foggy moved toward the door. “Two years ago. Three years ago. Five years ago. Before you became this—this _monster_ —I would have let you.”

Foggy had had enough of this.

“Get up,” he said. “You’ve got work to do.”

“You’re not lost, Foggy.”

“Get _up_.”

“I knew you before this. You guided me without being asked.”

“Matthew.”

“You did the cases, _all_ the cases, for ten days on your own. No one asked you to.”

“I’m not saying it again.”

“Your heartbeat slows down around Peter.”

The silence rushed back in from the darkest corners of the office. Matthew stayed right where he was.

“You pity him,” he breathed. “You pity me. You pity all of those people outside that door.”

“Matthew,” Foggy sighed. “I’m not an idiot. I know what you want from me, and it’s not going to happen.”

“Wilson Fisk killed Peter’s last living relative,” Matthew argued. “He wants the Kitchen. He’s going to move in. This is the start of it. You know it. I know it. This is the first step. But you won’t fight him. Why—why won’t you—”

Ms. Page was just barely a hallway away. Mike Murdock was sat next to her, no doubt straining his ears for the sound of violence.

“You don’t know anything about me, Matthew,” Foggy enunciated.

“That’s a goddamned lie,” Matthew said. “You saved my life. You nearly took it, don’t you think that I will _ever_ forget, but here’s what I know about you: you nearly took my life, but you gave it back to me. You gave it back because you don’t care about Wilson Fisk or Daredevil, and you don’t care about life or death. You’re not in this for the money or the power, you’re in this because the only thing you know how to do—the only thing you’ve ever been good at--is being the best. It would be a waste of everything you’ve ever worked for if your opponent called it quits before you, wouldn’t it? What a life, huh, Fogs? I bet it’s real lonely at the top.”

No.

No, this wasn’t happening.

“I bet that’s why you won’t touch Fisk. He’s not worthy competition to you. He’s too messy. He’s got no method or grace. He doesn’t see what you see—what I see.”

“You don’t see shit, Matt,” Foggy snapped.

“I see the challenge,” Matthew cut him off. “And you see the challenge. And you probably forgot, so busy being fixing things the easy way, earning As without studying, digging that gaping maw in your humanity and treating people like cattle to be slaughtered, that the real challenge, the one that is actually worth your time, is the one that you fight for, tooth and nail.”

“Leave,” Foggy said.

Matt got to his feet.

“You, Franklin Nelson, are the same breed as I am,” he hissed. “And I’ve known it since the day we met. The way that you interact with my kid out there? The way you won that case earlier in court? That’s what gave it away. You _thrive_ with the challenge. You seek it out. You found it in me and now you’re finding it in this firm and it’s like an addiction, isn’t it?”

“Leave,” Foggy warned. “Or your bastard brother is going to be carrying you to church on his shoulders.”

“You first,” Matthew said.

Foggy could feel his breath coming faster than it was allowed to. His face was hot. His nails dug into the skin of his palms.

“If you don’t need it—if you’re truly content with playing the same game of chess over and over and over, go.”

Fury invoked dryness, but honesty—and honesty pointed out in confidence by a powerless body no less—tasted like _bile._

Matthew laughed softly.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Checkmate, Mr. Nelson. Welcome back to your humanity.”

Where had things gone wrong?

“A little birdie told me that the man who bought this business from Jacob O’Shay was found dead in his upstairs toilet.”

How had Foggy lost this battle of will to Matthew Fucking Murdock?

“I suppose I could have told you that from the start.”

Foggy could leave. He could end this game right now. He could sink his thumbs into Matthew’s throat like he had those months ago. He could drop his body into that waterlogged mud pit that he’d dug in the rain.

“But where is the fun in that, am I right? I think it might be in uncovering a coerced signature—what do you think?”

Foggy thought—

Foggy thought--

“Do you think Fisk thinks I’m as pretty as you do?”

Foggy took a deep breath in and let it out slowly.

“You’re stooping, Matthew,” he said. “I thought Daredevil worked for no man but his own.”

Matthew turned towards him with his hand on the doorhandle.

“He doesn’t,” he said simply. “But occasionally, he finds it in himself to work _with_ others towards a common goal. Let’s call Fisk a mutual enemy, Fogs. You and me, in it to win it. And when we’re done, you can go back to trying to make me your cute little pet. It’ll be fun. Oh—but you should know, Mike’s already saved a copy of your Bar Association ID to his files. Ms. Page scanned it for you, did you know? She’s really on top of things; thanks for hiring her—but anyways, it would be shame if your real name fell into the wrong hands, now, wouldn’t it?”

This bastard.

This absolute bastard.

“I think this is the start of a _beautiful_ partnership,” Matthew crooned in an imitation of his goddamned brother, “We should call it something—oh, how about ‘Nelson & Murdock’? It’s got a good ring to it.”

He slammed the door behind him.

Foggy clenched his teeth, surveying Peter, who was once again sat on the center of his desk. This time placed there by an uncaring god and by the body that Foggy was going to have shot on sight the next time it left the building.

“I hate all of you,” he told the child.

Peter looked up at him.

“Matt says that I’m not supposed to talk to you,” he said.

Brat.

Monstrosity.

Mutant.

“He said you’re gonna out kingpin Wilson Fisk for the O’Shays because you’ve got Straight-A-Student Syndrome. And because you might get murdered if Uncle Mike tells someone your name. And because Matt thinks that you’re secretly a good person under all the supervillain stuff. It’s kinda confusing though. I thought we were supposed to work on the Fisk thing as a team, you and me?”

What in god’s name was the child looking for in the cracks of the desk? Actually no. Foggy no longer cared.

“I think I’m going to murder your owner,” he said.

Peter yanked his torso up from the front-face of the desk.

“Is it ‘cause you lost to him in your own game?” he asked.

…yes.

“It’s okay, I’m a bad loser too.”

You have _no_ idea, boy.

“Uncle Mike says you’ve got the hots for Matt, too.”

Michael Murdock would be buried in a coffin that specifically did not match Matthew’s to ruin his afterlife.

“He said that people in love are the stupidest people he’s ever met and that’s why I’m not allowed to date people ever.”

Foggy was going to drill holes in the top of said coffin and flood it with hydrochloric acid.

“Does this mean that you’re our kingpin now?”

“When did you stop clicking around me?” Foggy demanded.

Peter blinked at him.

“After Wade told me that you were a chump and he was gonna prove it. He’s the one who told Matt what he was coming back to the office. He told Matt get you alone and to suck your dick, but I guess y’all didn’t get that far. Kinda makes sense; Matt’s really angry with you, you know. He stopped being sad a few days ago and started doing the Mad-Claw at windows again.”

Wade Wilson.

Target Number One.

“You’re not a very good kingpin, Foggy. Fisk just kills people who get too close to him. You let ‘em live, and then they come around to bite you in the butt.”

Oh, shut up.

“I’m going to raze this office to the ground and salt the earth underneath it,” Foggy sighed.

“Yeah, but then Fisk will have more offices then you. I hear he’s got two in Queens,” Peter said as he picked through all the pens in the cup by Foggy’s keyboard.

Foggy sneered, then caught himself. Matthew was _not_ right about anything. And Foggy was not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing anything more about anything.

“What if I bit him? Do you think he’d get spider-sick?” Peter asked.

“I think you’re venomous and should come here and bite me now,” Foggy spat.

Peter considered him.

“Okay,” he said.

WAIT.


End file.
